Electronic Health Record Standards - A Brief Overview

Most medical information systems store clinical information about patients in proprietary format. To address the resulting interoperability problems, several electronic health record (EHR) standards that enable structured clinical content for the purpose of exchange are currently under development. In this article, we present a brief overview of the most relevant EHR standards, examine the level of interoperability they provide and assess their functionality in terms of content structure, access services, multimedia support and security.