MERIT-9 Standard Conformant Patient Data Referral from HIS Client Editor to PC Based Browsers

Abstract

 In exchanging clinical data between healthcare providers, granularity of exchanged data and application coverage of exchanging standard are not satisfied in the same time. Seeking high level data exchange, where exchanged datum goes into recipient database and is able to be used as retrieval key, usecase must be clarified. The authors first stated MERIT-9 patient data referral standard, which is based on XML-DTD with HL7, DICOM entities, then prepared a MERIT-9 editor on HIS clients of PC-ORDERING97. Two MERIT-9 referral document browsers were developed, one at Tokyo University Hospital, another at Hamamatsu University Hospital. The MERIT-9 referral document exchange between the HIS client editor and two browsers were successful. The authors plan to extend this feature to other HIS clients, as well as clinic office PC's. This MERIT-9 referral document standard will be kept coherent with the Ministry of Health and Welfare project, which is expected to output basic data element set for clinical data exchange between healthcare providers.