XML-based Personal Health Record system

Medical informatics has currently been greatly developed with the help of the information technology. However, as people are more concerning about their individual health condition, these hospital-oriented health information management systems might not suffice to meet such demand. Therefore, Personal Heath Record (PHR), a new way of managing people´s health-related information, was proposed. PHR is an individuality-oriented health information management system in which people can store, query, and manage their health-related information, such as case histories, health examination results, daily records and so forth. With PHR, health resources can be well integrated and people could become the manager of his own health. Considering that the health records in PHR come from various hospitals and organizations, which results in different data format and unpredicted data structure, we choose XML as the data format, for XML supports multi-platform and it´s readability and extensibility is also satisfactory. Meanwhile, some existing standards such as HL7 CDA are also based on XML, which could serve as a ideal reference in designing the XML-based PHR system.