Medical records and electronic documents: a proposal

This article presents a global view of our proposal for a medical information system of the future. This information system focuses on patient medical records management. As most of the existing systems, it proposes to store information from patient records in a database. But records capture is different: we propose to use weakly-structured documents. Such documents contain paragraphs with some specific constraints represented by XML tags. The end-user writes new information under the form of weakly-structured documents. An internal system translates theses documents into new data for the internal database. Such a document-based user interface provides much more freedom to the end-user, and certainly reduces the distance between the physicians' way of working and the capture system.