title: Clinical documents: attribute-values entity representation,context, page layout and communication.
abstract: This paper presents how acquisition, storage and communication of clinical documents is implemented at the University Hospitals of Geneva. Careful attention has been given to user-interfaces, in order to support complex layouts, spell checking, and templates management with automatic prefilling. A dual architecture has been developed for storage using an entity-attribute-value unified database and a consolidated, patient-centered, layout-respectful file-based storage, providing both representation power and speed of access. This architecture allows a great flexibility for storing a continuum of data types, ranging from simple typed values to complex clinical reports. Finally, communication is entirely based on HTTP-XML internally, and a HL-7 CDA interface V2 is currently studied for external communication. Some of the problems encountered, mostly related to the typology of documents and the ontology of clinical attributes are evoked.
authors.affiliation: University Hospitals of Geneva, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Christian Lovis
authors.initials: CL
authors.lastname: Lovis
authors.forename: Alexander
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Lamb
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Baud
authors.forename: Anne-Marie
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Rassinoux
authors.forename: Paul
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Fabry
authors.forename: Antoine
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Geissbühler
mesh_terms: D003199:Computer Systems; D019992:Databases as Topic / Q000458:organization & administration; D020000:Decision Support Systems, Clinical; D006751:Hospital Information Systems / Q000458:organization & administration*; D006785:Hospitals, University; D006801:Humans; D019451:Information Management; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D016347:Medical Records Systems, Computerized / Q000458:organization & administration*; D012660:Semantics; D012984:Software; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D013557:Switzerland; D014584:User-Computer Interface