Non-invasive light-weight integration engine for building EHR from autonomous distributed systems

In this paper we describe Pangea-LE, a message-oriented lightweight data integration engine that allows homogeneous and concurrent access to clinical information from disperse and heterogeneous data sources. The engine extracts the information and passes it to the requesting client applications in a flexible XML format. The XML response message can be formatted on demand by appropriate Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) transformations in order to meet the needs of client applications. We also present a real deployment in a hospital where Pangea-LE collects and generates an XML view of all the available patient clinical information. The information is presented to healthcare professionals in an Electronic Health Record (EHR) viewer Web application with patient search and EHR browsing capabilities. Implantation in a real setting has been a success due to the non-invasive nature of Pangea-LE which respects the existing information systems.