Expressing health care objects in XML

Abstract

The patient medical record has been entirely focused on being in a form that is human readable and has ignored the requirements for machine processing. Health care information transaction standards, such as HL7 (Health Level 7) and EDI X12, have been almost entirely focused on machine interaction and have ignored the paper-based medical record. We need to reach a middle ground. Documents need to be in a form in which humans are able to locate, read and analyze and one in which machines are able to process. XML, combined with distributed object technologies has the potential to reach this middle ground; however, there are some challenges. These challenges relate to the state of clinical information in health care today.