A Flexible Approach for Electronic Medical Records Exchange

Many methodologies have been proposed in the last decade for integration and exchange of medical data. However, little progress has occurred due to the following reasons. First, patients are reluctant to give full access to their historical medical data. Second, institutions are reluctant to open their systems to mediators or any type of external access, due to security, privacy (HIPPA, unique patient id) and competitive advantage-related reasons. We propose a flexible mechanism for electronic medical record (EMR) exchange, which allows generating a customized EMR using a generic approach independent of existing healthcare applications. Furthermore, we provide an on-demand, secure, efficient, and semantics-agnostic way to exchange EMRs in a collaborative environment using our declarative communication engine, which we call Communication Virtual Machine (CVM). CVM negotiates the capabilities of the involved parties and underlying networks to guarantee Quality of Service and presentation compatibility. CVM can also be customized to enforce privacy and security requirements (e.g., HIPAA) by enabling logging, authentication, and so on. Finally, we provide a way to seamlessly integrate EMR generation and exchange between healthcare providers. A prototype of our EMR exchange approach has been implemented which integrates the i-Rounds® medical record system used at Miami Children’s Hospital. 1