An Information Architecture for Electronic Health Records Using MPEG-21 Multimedia Framework

The concept of Electronic Health Record (EHR) has been proposed as a key element of health information management. The main challenges for EHR implementation are related to issue of interoperability and security. Meanwhile, in the multimedia world, MPEG-21 has been created as an open, interoperable, transparent, secure framework enabling universal multimedia accessibility. Key concepts in the MPEG-21 framework include the Digital Item, which is the basic unit of transaction and an Intellectual Property Management and Protection (IPMP) framework for Digital Rights Management (DRM). This paper compares the Digital Item and Electronic Health Record concepts, and describes an information architecture where MPEG-21 is proposed as a framework to implement the EHR.