Abstract
This research aims to provide the protocol to achieve efficient information exchange by means of electronic data communication between health-checkup facilities. Joint Working Group of JMHTS (The Japan Society of Multiphasic Health Testing and Service) and JAHIS (The Japanese Association of HHHealthcaae Information Systems Industry) developed a health/medical data interchange model that stood on the markup information structure. Our data encoding language, HDML (Health-checkups Data Markup Language), was based on SGML that has context-free grammar. HDML had the standard DTD which defined anamnesis, physical examination, laboratory examination, summary findings, and judgment of total health status, etc. The laboratory examination contains following items: item's name, method, unit, device, company name, product name, principle, and standard reference value. We take into account the interchangeability of data with HL7 and other international standard protocols. As a preliminary study, we carried out an experimental trial in October 1999, which transferred laboratory data by translating into HDML, from 2 health-checkup facilities to other 2 health-checkup facilities. We have succeeded in transferring almost all laboratory data appropriately by using the HDML protocol between the health-checkup facilities. Moreover, we could convert and standardize the laboratory data properly from the information written in the DTD. We propose the HDML protocol to standardize health/medical data that will make it available for multihealth facilities on the basis of the standardization of data exchange regarding health-checkups. We found this HDML protocol worked effectively in using the actual health/medical data.
