Electronic health information standard based on CDA for Thai medical system: Focused on medical procedures in medium-sized hospitals (HOSxP)

Electronic health information standards have been developed in several countries, which are in different formats. The Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) is the most acceptable and widely used. In addition, Hospital and Experience (HOSxP) is a Healthcare Information System (HIS) developed by Bangkok Medical Software (BMS), which is currently deployed by medium-sized hospitals in Thailand. However, different hospitals may use different HISs. For example, many small-sized hospitals use Java Health Center Information System (JHCIS). Thus, electronic medical information transfer is not trivial. Currently, in Thailand, the patient transferring process relies on a paper work. Therefore, this paper is to propose electronic health information standard based on CDA, which is in an Extensible Markup Language (XML) format, focused on medical procedures using HOSxP system. This work consists of three main developing phases: (1) data mapping, (2) data exporting, (3) data importing. First, data recorded in the HOSxP database is mapped to data required by the corresponding CDA, which will be slightly adjusted to suit Thai medical information. Second, data recorded in the database is extracted and exported into the CDA based standard, which will be transferred to another (i.e. destination) hospital for the patient transfer. Third, once the destination hospital receives the CDA based standard file, it needs to import the embedded patient information from the file into its database. Then, this transferred patient record can be used across the hospital as basis information for further treatment.