Standardized EHR interoperability - preliminary results of a German pilot project using the archetype methodology.

ABSTRACT

The mobility of doctors and patients asks for multilingualism of electronic health record (EHR) systems Doctors might face language problems using foreign medical information systems; people working abroad ask for continuous care which requires the treating physician to consult and understand the patient's health record. To address these linguistic and interoperability issues a solution is being developed that is based on widely acclaimed standards. Medical concepts that are derived from ASTM CCR define an interface model (based on ISO 13606). A server manages the data exchange between heterogeneous systems based on the interface model. It provides web services (automatic) and web forms (manual) and performs a transformation from the legacy scheme to the common structure. Furthermore, the server provides rich visualization capabilities (e.g. language-switch, custom charts etc.) which are useful for those EHR systems that don't provide these features.