Management of discharge summaries based on XML

The proliferation of XML as the standard for information exchange has given rise to an increase of XML based healthcare information system. This is due in part to the increase of standardization works based on this technology. XML facilitates the interoperability among heterogeneous systems, the panacea for electronic patient record systems. This paper addresses the benefits of using XML in the management of discharge summaries, an essential document in the medical context. Further benefits of the integration of heterogeneous healthcare systems are reported too. An architecture for edition, storage, retrieval and query of this kind of documents and first results in this line are presented.