The role of XML in medical informatics in Hungary

Reforms in healthcare means frequent changes. The author focusing on flexible information systems and data structures in healthcare, that gives the chance to avoid costly deadlocks, incompatibilities and data chaos--keeping the financial and administrative burden of provider and reimbursement information systems at low level. He describes data and document exchange among health care providers (hospitals, GPs etc.) and the reimbursing insurance institute introducing XML (eXtensible Markup Language) technology and it's multimedia extension called SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) that well supports large textual and multimedia nature of data in healthcare. He presents the most frequent XML datasets for reimbursement in Hungary, the validation schemas (Data Type Definitions) and procedures, comparing the new and old data file sizes with different compressions. The comparison includes different schema file sizes, and validation times.