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Proof-of-concept Design and Development of an EN13606-based Electronic Health Care Record Service

^a Bioengineering and Telemedicine Laboratory, University Hospital "Puerta de Hierro", Madrid, Spain
^b Department of Telemedicine and Information Society from Health Institute "Carlos III", Madrid, Spain.

^_* Correspondence and reprints: Adolfo Muñoz, BmE, Laboratorio de Bioingeniería y Telemedicina, Hospital Universitario "Puerta de Hierro" c/ San Martín de Porres 4, 28035 Madrid, Spain (Email: amunoz{at}bioing.cph.es).

Received for publication: 01/13/06; accepted for publication: 09/24/06.

Objective: The authors present an Electronic Healthcare Record (EHR) server, designed and developed as a proof of concept of the revised prEN13606:2005 European standard concerning EHR communications.

Methods: The development of the server includes five modules: the libraries for the management of the standard reference model, for the demographic package and for the data types; the permanent storage module, built on a relational database; two communication interfaces through which the clients can send information or make queries; the XML (eXtensible Markup Language) process module; and the tools for the validation of the extracts managed, implemented on a defined XML-Schema.

Results: The server was subjected to four phases of trials, the first three with ad hoc test data and processes to ensure that each of the modules complied with its specifications and that the interaction between them provided the expected functionalities. The fourth used real extracts generated by other research groups for the additional purpose of testing the validity of the standard in real-world scenarios.

Conclusion: The acceptable performance of the server has made it possible to include it as a middleware service in a platform for the out-of-hospital follow-up and monitoring of patients with chronic heart disease which, at the present time, supports pilot projects and clinical trials for the evaluation of eHealth services.