Tools for Dynamic Integration of Medical Informatics Systems

Comprehensive response to medical emergencies, including acts of terrorism and natural disasters, will require improved coordination between civilian and military healthcare systems. The ability of emergency medical response teams to remotely access medical health records of individual patients will significantly improve the emergency healthcare decision process and quality of resulting treatment. However, health records are typically scattered among a number of healthcare institutions and are stored in a variety of formats. Communication between various healthcare informatics systems is hampered by the lack of widely implemented standards for content, format, and transmission. IAC (Intelligent Automation Corporation) proposes to employ its expertise in data and application integration to design and implement a system for rapid integration and presentation of data from diverse, heterogeneous medical informatics systems. The proposed system makes use of emerging standards for the electronic patient data records, novel ontology-based information processing approaches, and platform-independent open architecture based on Web services. The Phase I work will provide initial demonstration of methodology and software architecture.