Integrating Health Care Information Using XML-based Metadata

In today's distributed healthcare environment, information is a key asset and getting access to that data is vital to the management of a patient's health. Electronic Health Record (EHR) standards aim to assist in the interoperable access and integration of this distributed information. This paper describes the research efforts currently being pursued by the 'Titanium' team at DSTC, in collaboration with the Australian GEHR project. The aim of this project is to design and develop a metadata-based information infrastructure that can use clinical data standards from different organisations to support seamless, standardised querying, exchange and integration of a variety of clinical information sources. Towards this end, we describe how popular Internet data formats, such as XML and XML-Schema can be used to support the standardisation of localised, clinical metadata; how conceptual modelling techniques can be used to design and validate XML-schema-based clinical data models and how these techniques can be used to support the querying, exchange and integration of heterogeneous clinical data over the Internet.