A Novel Graphical-Oriented Framework for Capturing Data within Clinical Information Systems

Abstract

One of the main challenges in the development and implementation of computerized health care systems is the physicians and nurses’ resistance, stemming in particular from the use of text based environments for the capture of their medical examination data. The purpose of the present study was to propose the basis for a graphical oriented framework which can be used to capture data for a medical examination therefore easing the data-entry using the keyboard. Following analysis of a classical general medical examination, an XML schema was designed to describe physical examinations. Based on the physical examination XML schema, XML data structures are transformed to HTML using XML transformation style sheets to create dynamic graphical user interface (GUI) widgets; user interactions with the widgets leads to the generation of sentences. The key advantages of the proposed system are: a) a reduction in the keyboard usage, b) the ability to codify the generation sentence accurately and c) an operating system platform independence. A prototype of usage of the above framework is also presented.