An Act Indexing Information Model for Clinical Data Integration

Making accurate clinical diagnoses, treatment plans and preventive measures relies on the comparison and inter-confirmation among various kinds of clinical data. Due to the complexity of the hospital environment, the clinical data always originate from different medical information systems with incompatible structures. These heterogeneous clinical data are stored dispersedly and isolated from one another. It is very difficult to accomplish integrated query and visualization. This paper brings forward a Healthcare Act Indexing Information Model (HAIIM) to build a centralized index of heterogeneous clinical data. It organizes these data effectively according to the act-centered view of healthcare from Health Level Seven (HL7) Reference Information Model (RIM). We incorporated the resulting model into building of a "virtual" clinical data center, which enables the integrated query of heterogeneous clinical data. Based on HAIIM, we designed and implemented an integrated viewer to visualize clinical data according to the two dimensional act-time relationships.