Project:   XML & Discharge Summary Automation

Description:

The purpose of this project was to investigate the impact of XML encoding on the potential for automating Discharge Summary creation.

Participants:

St. John's is an integrated delivery system.

Current Status:

The project has been underway for from 6-12 months and is considered to be at the prototype demonstration stage.

Problems Solved:

Expected problems: Discharge Summaries often repeat information included in the patient chart, but that information is re-keyed after being located by hand from a paper chart. In short, the typical DS is dictated without leveraging any of the available electronic records including lab data and transcribed narrative reports.

Lessons:

Insights: Physicians view the use of structured markup as an aided to the delivery of care as long as their control over the record is asserted and maintained.

Obstacles: Lack of Standards for XML Clinical Documents,Lack of tooling to support creationand processing of XML Clinical documents,Lack of tooling to support creationand processing of XML Clinical documents

Samples:

None provided.

Contact:

Contact Name: Fred Owens
Email Address:    fowens@iu.net