Revolutionary impact of XML on biomedical information interoperability

The use of Extensible Markup Language (XML) to implement data sharing and semantic interoperability in healthcare and life sciences has become ubiquitous in recent years. Because in many areas there was no preexisting data format, XML has been readily embraced and is having a great impact. Biomedical data is very heterogeneous, varying from administrative information to clinical data, and recently to genomic data, making information exchange a great challenge. In particular, it is hard to achieve semantic interoperability among disparate and dispersed systems—a common constellation in the fragmented world of healthcare. Moreover, the emerging patient-centric and information-based medicine approach is posing another challenge—the development and use of an integrated health record for each patient. This means that diverse data from many systems has to be generated, integrated, and become available at the point of care. This paper presents the case that XML is becoming the integration “glue” for biomedical information interoperability, which can lead to improvements in pharmaceuticals, genomic-based clinical research, and personalized medicine, which, for the first time, can be fine-tuned to serve individuals through their longitudinal electronic health records.