Design of a health care architecture for medical data interoperability and application integration

The Internet is changing the face of medical research. The current world of isolated research and proprietary data encodings is evolving into a future of standardized medical databases and integrated medical applications, such as clinical decision support systems. This paper explores the use of XML, and its associated Schema Language, to enhance sharing of medical data. XML enables data portability and will reach its full potential when the medical community develops a standardized basis for medical schema content and shares these schemas in recognized repositories. Our research group is currently harnessing XML's standardization potential by designing a standards-compliant, medical information infrastructure that will allow for seamless integration of all our clinical decision support tools.