Canonical document for medical data exchange

Abstract

In the healthcare domain, the number of heterogeneous standards and medical applications is large. In consequence, the decision about which system and standard are more appropriate is difficult. The most widely deployed healthcare standard is Health Level Seven. Unfortunately, this standard has problems. The version 3 has seen slow adoption and the version 2.x had interoperability problems because of the variety of implementations by healthcare providers. To reduce the health interoperability problem between health information systems, we propose a canonical document for exchanging medical information. This document will be used as mediator between healthcare systems and shall allow health providers to share data among healthcare institutions without any adjustment or requirements. As result, the proposed mediator can make the exchange of health data simpler and efficient.