Scott Koegler
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

As principal consultant of Semantec, and also principal consultant for The Intelligent Healthcare Practice, Stephen Lahanas is involved in trying to solve issues around one of the most talked-about areas of U.S. concern - the health care system.

Listen to my interview with Lahanas for the specifics of his take on how semantics can and should be leveraged to help our healthcare system.

Stephen covers several key issues in this conversation, including:

*The existing highly different, and often proprietary platforms storing medical data present tremendous difficulty when trying to consolidate the data from these different systems.

*Traditional data integration techniques relying on static mapping methodologies are likely to be cumbersome and take a long time to complete, if they can ever be completed.

*The use of semantic technologies to create abstraction layers that bring the different data structures together as common, accessible systems.

Lahanas points to the DoD's Alta program and the VA's VISTA program that, combined, have spent about $7 billion. These systems are looking at the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) to get the job completed. But because of the fact that there may be dozens, or even hundreds of data formats to deal with, Lahanas says that dynamically defined integration is likely to be the better choice.

He compares the choice of semantic technologies with the previous set of W3C standards, most prominently XML, and comments on how the adoption of XML actually increased the complexity of integrating systems because of its highly flexible structure. Lahanas sees an end product as a system that allows users to query a unified system for information they need, rather than rely on the current system static reports.

The ultimate goal is to redefine the healthcare IT lifecycle management, going beyond the management of practice information and simple data storage, to the exploitation of the knowledge contained within the data. Lahanas points to the efficiencies that can be gained by creating a transparency between and within huge healthcare systems such as the Army or Air Force.