Standardized EHR interoperability - preliminary results of a German pilot project using the archetype methodology.

The mobility of doctors and patients asks for multilingualism of electronic health record (EHR) systems: Doctors might face language problems using foreign medical information systems; people working abroad ask for continuous care which requires the treating physician to consult and understand the patient's health record. To address these linguistic and interoperability issues a solution is being developed that is based on widely acclaimed standards. Medical concepts that are derived from ASTM CCR define an interface model (based on ISO 13606). A server manages the data exchange between heterogeneous systems based on the interface model. It provides web services (automatic) and web forms (manual) and performs a transformation from the legacy scheme to the common structure. Furthermore, the server provides rich visualization capabilities (e.g. language-switch, custom charts etc.) which are useful for those EHR systems that don't provide these features.