Clinical data integration of distributed data sources using Health Level Seven (HL7) v3-RIM mapping.

Background: Health information exchange and health information integration has become one of the top priorities for healthcare systems across institutions and hospitals. Most organizations and establishments implement health information exchange and integration in order to support meaningful information retrieval among their disparate healthcare systems. The challenges that prevent efficient health information integration for heterogeneous data sources are the lack of a common standard to support mapping across distributed data sources and the numerous and diverse healthcare domains.