AN INFORMATION MODEL FOR MEDICAL EVENTS

Information gathered during the healthcare process is lost when forced into rigidly structured record-oriented databases. By contrast, conte nt can be difficult to manipulate if stored as unstructured text. Spur red by the requirements of electronic publishing, military procurement and the Internet, new robust standards for structuring documents have been developed and deployed. These standards can provide a foundation for a document-based Electronic Medical Record System. In order to fu lly exploit this added flexibility, an information model is necessary to define both the direct and contextual content of documents. Once co ntext, as well as fact, are recorded in formal structures, inferential techniques can either selectively extract knowledge and data from doc uments or aggregate data to create summaries so that all interested an d authorized parties have a better chance of meeting their information needs from a single, permanent data source.