New standards for cardiology report and data communication: an experience with HL7 CDA release 2 and EbXML

The diffusion of health standards, connected to technological infrastructure, finally opens the road to a new way of interconnecting and integrating different clinical solutions. New standards coming from established Organizations such as HL7 and DICOM, are going to be integrated with Communication Organization to build the Health environment Info-structure of the next decade. The purpose of this work is to show how this is possible, using simple and affordable methods: The recently approved HL7 Clinical Document Architecture Release 2 standard for message packaging and the newly approved ebXML 3.0 specifications. These promising standards can be used in conjunction with Web-Services and Web Service Description Language (WSDL) technology. This type of solution allows to be totally independent from the development platform, from the programming language and the operating system used. EbXML is an XML framework for business-to-business (B2B) environment developed by the ebXML Initiative