Implementation of a novel virtual patient record architecture

A Virtual Patient Record (VPR) is an ideal Electronic Healthcare Record (EHR) that is decentralized and contains heterogeneous and distributed medical and clinical data. Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a Web standard that was introduced by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and today has become the major driver towards heterogeneous system integration for any industry solution. This work presents our efforts to create an XML schema that operates as an interface between different heterogeneous patient record structures. The XML schema structure is based on standards such as HL7, DICOM, VITAL, GEHR and prENV 13606-4 and was modeled with UML metadata techniques. We have validated this XML schema by implementing various healthcare scenarios and using state of the art Java components and XML based technologies. Initially the system has been tested in two homecare scenarios (anticoagulation treatment and ventilation and oxygen therapy support) in conjunction with a standard primary healthcare patient record database.