Making heterogeneous medical databases interoperable

The increasing use of computer systems for storing patient information in different hospitals, in different departments within the same hospital, in clinics and even in doctors' surgeries, is creating a problem in terms of the fragmentation of the patient record. The lack of any coordination or standardization in the way in which data are represented and stored in these different systems makes the task of finding and retrieving data that much more difficult. This paper considers two aspects of this problem and describes an architecture which can be used to overcome them.