Affiliations: Department of Computer Information Systems, BMCC, City
University of New York, New York, USA | Department of Computer Science, South Texas College of
Science and Technology, McAllen, TX, USA | Department of Information Management, China University
of Technology, Taipei, Taiwan | Department of Computer Science, University of
Texas-Pan American, Edinburg, TX, USA
Abstract: This paper describes an integration of structured and unstructured
text data in a Clinical Information System (CIS). The input and output data of
this Clinical Information System depend heavily on the use of a medical
database and an intensive Graphic User Interface (GUI). The data source
consists of multiple GUI's fields of various forms which compose
structured data and free-text medical reports of patients. These free text
medical reports are mostly made of the complicated part of unstructured text
data. Usually, the free text medical reports include reports on patient intake,
examination, and discharge, which could be an input from a keyboard, a
handwriting device, a voice microphone, transcription service or others. Some
of the medical language extraction and encoding systems, such as MedLEE, can be
used to translate the medical free text into a standard and structured format.
These systems will be reviewed and adopted to perform the knowledge extraction
from medical free texts, if applicable. To achieve the goal of data sharing for
the future application in data interoperability between heterogeneous database
systems, a clinical data repository can be stored which is formed by applying a
standard-compliant eXtensible Markup Language (XML), with GUI form, for
integrating these data. Currently there are a number of healthcare information
standards, such as HL7 (Health Level 7, 2006) and Medical Markup Language
(Medical Markup Language, 2006) to promote data exchange. But it requires that
both the sender and receiver of the data use the same standard in order to
achieve the data exchange goal. In this paper, the generic data XML model is
therefore developed and the feasibility for transforming the model into any of
the standards is also demonstrated.
Keywords: clinical information systems, data exchange and sharing, data interoperability, eXtensible Markup Language document, graphic user interface, structured and unstructured data source transformation and
integration
