Rune Pedersen

Bio

Hi, my name is Rune Pedersen, I work at NSE as a department manager and senior researcher. I also work at UiT as an associate professor.

My research project: Semantic interoperability to support the development of process-oriented EPR systems towards integrated care.

Taking Norwegian White Paper 9 as its jumping-off point, it builds on the aim of a patient record which states that healthcare staff should have simple and secure access to patient and user information.
The overall aim is for this research to help develop holistic clinical patient journeys by using heterogeneous interoperable EPR systems.
Getting systems from multiple providers to exchange information in a simple way is a solution to the challenges we face where access to information from other institutions is limited. This is a solution based on a 2-level model where clinical data and the ICT system are organised separately, and where clinics are actively involved in designing structured content.
The project is primarily qualitative, with follow-up research and action research in on-going projects nationally and internationally where the focus is on semantics and interoperability for clinical health information. The project is being conducted in cooperation with researchers on the ward.

Giving EPR systems the ability to be structured requires an underlying clinical information model for variables or structures. This type of clinical information model is OpenEHR. OpenEHR also has a reference model which contributes to the structure, and an open format and standardised programming language.
One of the benefits of OpenEHR is that the information architects have access to software they can use to model clinical variables or other structured content for patient record systems. This software is also used as a library for consensus-based information and for modelling content across healthcare regions.

By using OpenEHR and dedicated software, a combined national environment within specialist healthcare services is working towards defining the overall consensus in clinical information, variables and persistent data. A future library will contain consensus-based information that can be sent and received between wards at a hospital and between hospitals across healthcare companies and regions.

I am part of designing these processes and use the research as an arena for identifying and developing the processes we have and will have.