Service Oriented Tools for Medical Records Management and Versioning

Abstract

The technological impact of the Internet gave birth to telemedicine that provides both the digitalization of patient’s medical records, and the coordination between different healthcare actors. Work in this domain has shown that the standard XML is one of solid supports for the specification of the structure and of the semantic of clinical information, especially XML also ensures publishing medical records through Web. However, evolutions in time of XML schema of these records as well as interpenetration of temporal aspects in medical information are not sufficiently handled. In this paper, we address the problem of modeling, managing and implementing temporal medical data. We define efficient mechanisms for the management of multi-version medical records. For each structure evolution, our approach for schema versioning of XML medical records consists in creating a new schema version and in preserving old ones and their corresponding data. We present an algorithm to generate and to maintain schema versions of documents. We show the feasibility of our approach by the development of an application based on service oriented tools to publish services of versioned electronic medical records through the web.