| Abstract |
In a typical healthcare environment, numerous clinical information systems and eHealth services are been used. Their number and degree of heterogeneity continuously grows. In the context of use of such systems and services the need for the creation, management, and exchange, of clinical information in the form of documents to support continuity of care represents a fundamental requirement of modern clinical information systems. In parallel, recent technological advances related to the WWW and the emergence of XML as the dominant standard for marking up digital documents allows the creation of such documents. At the same time efforts to develop standards for the strict representation of their structure and semantics has been initiated by various standards development organizations. The main representative of such standards in the domain of healthcare is the HL7 organization, and the CDA (Clinical Document Architecture) standard, which is already widely adopted, and is been developed as an open standard focusing on structure and semantics of clinical documents. Taking all these under consideration, this thesis proposes a method for the creation of standardized clinical documents and the implementation of the required functions (i.e. editing, digital signing, printing etc.). This work adopts, in accordance to the directions of the HL7 organization, the definition of a clinical document as the composition of fragments focusing on (a) the requirement for consistency over time of clinical documents, (b) independent evolution of fragments, and (c) reusability of fragments. The main structural components used in the presented work are Document Templates and reusable Document Fragments. In the context of this thesis an integrated software environment and related tools for designing, composing, managing, and editing clinical documents has been implemented. Additionally, the necessary methods allowing clinical information systems to access the services provided by the environment have been defined. Thus, clinical information systems and services can evolve by adapting to the changing needs of the application domain. Finally, in order to verify the validity and adequacy of the proposed methods and tools, the designed environment has been integrated with a number of clinical information systems and eHealth services. The observed advantages and benefits are described and analyzed.
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Περιβάλλον Σχεδιασμού, Σύνθεσης, και Επεξεργασίας Τυποποιημένων Κλινικών Εγγράφων
