This paper describes a pragmatic, generic and flexible approach for the management of XML structured data at the example of pathology reports. The flexibility of this approach is based on a template concept. The template describes the documents of a given (clinical) domain in terms of structure and user interface requirements. The template enables a so called document manager to provide a corresponding user front and storage back end (XML document base). With the template approach, the application engineer merely needs to create and change templates in order to meet the latest documentation and application needs of a clinical domain. This presentation outlines our approach to more flexible clinical data structures.