The Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) Enables Electronic Medical Records to Wireless Mobile Computing

The Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) has proved to be a valuable and powerful standard for a structured exchange of clinical documents between heterogeneous software systems like a Hospital Information System and a Physician Office System. In this paper we want to show how the CDA can additionally be used in order to enhance the Hospital Information System's functionality: each patient related document contained in or generated from the HIS can be converted to a CDA/XML document. With the XML/XSLT-based transformation methods, those documents can be device-specifically transformed. We use this method to display HIS-content on mobile devices like Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) by extracting the respective data fields from the HIS database, converting them to a CDA/XML document, which is transformed and sent to the mobile devices using a wireless intranet connection. Preliminary results and users' comments are promising, but further evaluation will be necessary. Our approach shows a generic model how clinical data can be dis-played on different devices independently from the underlying HIS using CDA.