Building a portable data and information interoperability infrastructure - framework for a standard Taiwan Electronic Medical Record Template

Traditional electronic health record (EHR) data are produced from various hospital information systems. They could not have existed independently without an information system until the incarnation of XML technology. The interoperability of a healthcare system can be divided into two dimensions: functional interoperability and semantic interoperability. Currently, no single EHR standard exists that provides complete EHR interoperability. In order to establish a national EHR standard, we developed a set of local EHR templates. The Taiwan Electronic Medical Record Template (TMT) is a standard that aims to achieve semantic interoperability in EHR exchanges nationally. The TMT architecture is basically composed of forms, components, sections, and elements. Data stored in the elements which can be referenced by the code set, data type, and narrative block. The TMT was established with the following requirements in mind: (1) transformable to international standards; (2) having a minimal impact on the existing healthcare system; (3) easy to implement and deploy, and (4) compliant with Taiwan's current laws and regulations. The TMT provides a basis for building a portable, interoperable information infrastructure for EHR exchange in Taiwan.

[1]  Antonio Aguilar.  Semantic Interoperability in the Context of e-Health , 2005 .

[2]  Robert L Phillips,et al.  The continuity of care record. , 2004, American family physician.

[3]  Joachim Dudeck,et al.  Discharge and referral data exchange using global standards - the SCIPHOX project in Germany , 2003, Int. J. Medical Informatics.

[4]  J Dudeck,et al.  DTDs go XML schema--a tools perspective. , 2001, Medical informatics and the Internet in medicine.

[5]  Amnon Shabo,et al.  Model Formulation: HL7 Clinical Document Architecture, Release 2 , 2006, J. Am. Medical Informatics Assoc..

[6]  Catherine Arnott-Smith.  The Effect of XML Markup on Retrieval of Clinical Documents , 2003, AMIA.

[7]  Paul C. Miller,et al.  Interoperability: What is it and why should I want it? Ariadne 24 , 2000 .

[8]  P. V. Biron,et al.  The HL7 Clinical Document Architecture. , 2001, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA.

[9]  J. Mijic,et al.  HTML to XML conversion for non-programmers , 2005, 27th International Conference on Information Technology Interfaces, 2005..

[10]  Catherine Arnott Smith,et al.  Effect of XML markup on retrieval of clinical documents. , 2003, AMIA ... Annual Symposium proceedings. AMIA Symposium.

[11]  John Lane,et al.  IEEE Standard Computer Dictionary: Compilation of IEEE Standard Computer Glossaries , 1991 .

[12]  Joachim Dudeck,et al.  Advanced Information Retrieval Using XML Standards , 2005, MIE.

[13]  Sam Heard,et al.  Exploiting ebXML registry semantic constructs for handling archetype metadata in healthcare informatics , 2006, Int. J. Metadata Semant. Ontologies.

[14]  Peter Buxmann,et al.  Converting business documents:a classification of problems and solutions using XML/XSLT , 2002, Proceedings Fourth IEEE International Workshop on Advanced Issues of E-Commerce and Web-Based Information Systems (WECWIS 2002).