Health Data Semantics: Exploring Requirements for Sustainable Health Systems.

Health data cannot easily move from one healthcare provider to another, let alone between different countries. There is a de facto lack of health data interoperability in many healthcare systems preventing mobility and sharing of health data. Hitherto the literature has mainly considered technical aspects and challenges related to interoperability, but this paper will foremost explore semantic aspects. Using two cases of exploring data interoperability and the democratisation of health data as a backdrop, this paper presents existing challenges preventing sustainable health systems by focusing on semantic aspects of data interoperability in healthcare. A key finding is that data interoperability is possible and standardised data semantics are key resources to support data access within or across systems, for example between countries. The democratisation of health data, allowing different health systems to interact with each other, requires management of the shared semantic resources and the governance structures defining them. Domain experts, like medical doctors, can play an important role in co-designing and managing such shared, semantic resources.