The electronic medical record: using documents for information capture

This work concerns the management of electronic medical records. Classical systems based on databases do not satisfy end users, as the provided capture forms are never completely adapted to the patient case and to the physician's way of working. Electronic documents proved to be a better user interface paradigm, but still do not provide satisfying querying performance. Our work concerns the use of semi-structured documents as a user interface for a database-based system. The captured documents are analyzed so that information is extracted and used to fill in a database. We illustrate our proposition with the prototype we have developed and a short example.