In search of the name

Existing communications standards represent person name, date, time, and other ubiquitous attributes in various incompatible formats. The electronic medical record requires convergence of diverse representational systems toward a single communications standard or a harmonized group of standards. The obstacles to convergence include disparities in semantic definition, syntax, and communications protocols. To facilitate harmonization of existing standards, the message standards developers subcommittee of the ANSI HISPP (American National Standards Institute Healthcare Informatics Standards Planning Panel) has defined a set of common data types to facilitate semantic convergence. The authors present the general method used to develop the common data types. The derivation of the person name common data type is presented in detail. A general semantic model of the person name attribute is developed from observations of international usage conventions. A superset of the person name formats of the ACR-NEMA, ASTM, HL7, NCPDP, MEDIX, and X-12 standards is taken as the provisional starting point for a common data type definition. The convergence superset is compared with the general semantic model. Highly specialized and/or infrequently encountered sub components of the general model are combined into component complexes, thereby defining mappings to less rigorous representations. The ANSI HISPP common data types are specified for use in a demonstration of a prototype object-oriented HL7-DICOM HIS/PACS interface (between hospital information systems and imaging systems) at the 1993 Annual Meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.