Enhancing inter-operability and data sharing in medical information systems

Clinical care generates an immense amount of patient data that has been archived and manipulated by computer-based information systems. Such computer-based medical record systems improved the accessibility of clinical information and made several studies of such information possible. Unfortunately, the care provider's task of retrieving, integrating, and interpreting only those portions of the patient's record that are relevant to a specific clinical problem is actually becoming increasingly difficult. This difficulty can be attributed primarily to the large variety of minimum data sets, the heterogeneous formats used to store the data, the heterogeneous data access methods and procedures, the varying granularity of access to data, the different rigid views of the data, and the lack of inter-operability among the information repositories of such data sets. Recognizing the aforementioned issues, we are engaged in a project to build a multi-database environment tailored for the interoperability of medical information systems. The main building blocks of such a system are a multi-disciplinary minimum data set and a catalogue for the support of interoperability and customization functions. In this paper, we report on the design approach used and describe the general architecture of the system.