XML in healthcare

Joachim Dudeck

University of Giessen

Giessen

Germany

joachim.dudeck@informatik.med.uni-giessen.de

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Abstract

Information in healthcare is to a very large extent transmitted and stored as unstructured or slightly structured text like discharge letters, reports, forms etc.. In the past it was almost always difficult to extract and store the relevant information out of those documents. Full text retrieval was the only appropriate way which was used in a small number of projects only since it did not satisfy the expectations of the users.

Contents

XML has now opened a complete new approach and perspective in document handling, processing and message transmission. XML itself and the already published and finished accompanying standards like XPath, XSLT, XLink, Xpointer, Namespace, XML Schema have extended the power and the applicability of this new approach quite extensively. As we will see today several very successful attempts have already been made to apply XML in particular for handling medical record data in patient care. The examples show distinctly and convincingly how XML can improve the processing in particular of the data of the electronic patient record (EPR): But from these first experiments we also have learned several lessions which we have to keep in mind in our future work and which we should discuss in these two sessions today.

1. XML is a standard representation or exchange format only. It provides a standard framework for structuring textual documents but it does not standardize the content of these documents
2. XML allows to represent the same content in quite different ways. This is on one side an important advantage, on the other sides, as far as interoperability and exchange of information is concerned a disadvantage which has to be taken into consideration
3. Having these two experiences in mind we now have to start to standardize the representation of medical context in XML. How do we represent names, addresses, diagnosis, coded elements in general, findings etc. in XML has to be defined. How can we standardise the semantic meaning of tags and attributes is another important task of the near future. Nearly the same work which already has been done in HL7, X12 etc. has now to be done in a similiar way in XML also.

This has already been realized in other XML applications to a certain extend. It is up to now not so much recognised and has to be learned in XML applications in healthcare also in the near future. The related problems should become an important issue in our discussion within these to specific sessions on healthcare applications.