Supporting integrated care with a flexible data management framework built upon Linked Data, HL7 FHIR and ontologies.

In this paper we present the methodology and decisions behind an implementation of a telehealth data management framework, aiming to support integrated care services for chronic and multimorbid patients. The framework leverages an OWL ontology, built upon HL7 FHIR resources, to provide storage and representation of semantically enriched EHR data following Linked Data principles. This is presented along with the realization of the persistent storage solution and communication web services that allow the management of EHR data, ensuring the validity and integrity of the exchanged patient data as self-describing ontology instances. The framework concentrates on flexibility and reusability, which is addressed by regarding the aforementioned ontology as a single point of change. This solution has been implemented in the scope of the EU project WELCOME for managing data in a telemonitoring system for patients with COPD and co-morbidities and was also successfully deployed for the INLIFE EU project with minimal effort. The results of the two applications suggest it can be adopted and properly adapted in a series of integrated care scenarios with minimal effort.