Use of LOINC and SNOMED CT with FHIR for Microbiology Data

Infectious diseases due to microbial resistance pose a worldwide threat that calls for data sharing and the rapid reuse of medical data from health care to research. The integration of pathogen-related data from different hospitals can yield intelligent infection control systems that detect potentially dangerous germs as early as possible. Within the use case Infection Control of the German HiGHmed Project, eight university hospitals have agreed to share their data to enable analysis of various data sources. Data sharing among different hospitals requires interoperability standards that define the structure and the terminology of the information to be exchanged. This article presents the work performed at the University Hospital Charité and Berlin Institute of Health towards a standard model to exchange microbiology data. Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) is a standard for fast information exchange that allows to model healthcare information, based on information packets called resources, which can be customized into so-called profiles to match use case- specific needs. We show how we created the specific profiles for microbiology data. The model was implemented using FHIR for the structure definition, and the international standards SNOMED CT and LOINC for the terminology services.