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Standards for detailed clinical models as the basis for medical data exchange and decision support
Joseph F Coyle1, Angelo Rossi Mori, Stanley M Huff
1Intermountain Health Care, and Department of Medical Informatics, University of Untah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA.
Introduction:
Detailed clinical models are necessary to exchange medical data between heterogeneous computer systems and to maintain consistency in a longitudinal electronic medical record system. At Intermountain Health Care (IHC), we have a history of designing detailed clinical models. The purpose of this paper is to share our experience and the lessons we have learned over the last 5 years.
Design:
IHC's newest model is implemented using eXtensible Markup Language (XML) Schema as the formalism, and conforms to the Health Level Seven (HL7) version 3 data types. The centerpiece of the new strategy is the Clinical Event Model, which is a flexible name-value pair data structure that is tightly linked to a coded terminology.
Discussion:
We describe IHC's third-generation strategy for representing and implementing detailed clinical models, and discuss the reasons for this design.