Philips to talk about semantic interoperability issues in European healthcare at the Universidad Complutense, Madrid

Published: 07/22/2008

MADRID, SPAIN - (HealthTech Wire) - Dr. Theo Bosma, business development manager at Philips Speech Recognition Systems, has been invited to speak on the topic of semantic interoperability at a special course of the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, Spain (July 28, 2008). The course focuses on technologies and tools that help establish clinical standards in the European healthcare market.

"Ensuring semantic interoperability among member states has become a priority for the European Commission. The goal is to facilitate quality treatment for patients travelling across the European Union or those who live in border areas. This involves the sharing of clinical patient information between different healthcare IT systems," explains Dr. Bosma. "Integrating speech recognition into clinical IT applications can provide an accurate, convenient and efficient solution for generating information in a standardized format that allows data to be shared by the different systems – an approach which is enabled by semantic interoperability."

Dr. Bosma will showcase Philips' "InterOp" concept, which connects speech recognition to a real-time semantic language engine and to medical knowledge and pharmaceutical databases in an effort to standardize clinical patient information using medical terminology. The concept also envisages the storage of patient information in electronic medical record systems or other healthcare IT applications.  

"Today's clinical documentation still has inefficiencies which result in higher costs and which may jeopardize patient safety," says Dr. Bosma. "Standardized terminology considerably improves communication among healthcare systems and providers in different geographical areas. The course at the Universidad Complutense is a great opportunity to raise awareness about the topic among future clinicians and present them with the latest healthcare IT solutions in the field of speech recognition and semantic interoperability."

Further information about the event in Spanish is available here.