Cross-Border Exchange of Clinical Data Using Archetype Concepts Compatible with the International Patient Summary.

Abstract

This paper proposes an approach and demonstrates its application for cross-border exchange of clinical documents oriented towards the use of archetype concepts and international patient summary standards adopted in the European Union. A novelty in this approach is the management of native XML instances of an archetype concept in the CEN 13606 standard by means of a native XML database and XML technologies. The computer experiments demonstrate that it is suitable for representing relatively small clinical datasets such as those describing rare diseases like the Acromegaly illness, where the semantic context in the relatively small number of symptoms is practicable to tag in terms of SNOMED-CT terminology codes. Additionally, we demonstrate that the semantically enriched information model can facilitate secondary use of clinical data by visualizing the execution of queries based on standard terminologies. Finally, the compatibility of the information model with the IPS standard enables sharing of clinical data among different information models.