1)These are "elements".

2)These are "attributes" of an element. It is THAT crazy simple!

Wikipedia has an excellent detailed discussion on xml(click here)

Key points from Wikipedia:

• It is classified as an extensible language because it allows its users to define their own elements.

• Its primary purpose is to help information systems share structured data, particularly via the Internet, and it is used both to encode documents and to serialize data.

• It started as a simplified subset of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), and is designed to be relatively human-legible.

• By adding semantic constraints, application languages can be implemented in XML. These include XHTML,[4] RSS, MathML, GraphML, Scalable Vector Graphics, MusicXML, and thousands of others!!!!!!!!!

Xml is drop dead simple to understand. We have designed this xml emr from the ground up and it is intense! The most wonderful thing about this design is it can GROW - it has "evolution capacity". If you can dream something you want in the xml medical record we can make it happen. VETport's team of engineers live and breath xml and the tool we work with has the best xml object on the planet. With the key points in mind lets visit some pieces of VETport's xml based medical record.

1)Client and Patient demographics.

2)A master problem

3)A physical exam

Key Points: Relatively Human Legible. This document can be read by humans and very importantly "shredded" by any computer system(good one that is!) in the world - it can be shared.

We can define are own elements. Dream it and we will make it happen.

 

1)Details of the plan item including costs sent to invoicing.

2)Attributes gathered from the formulary database for automatic dose calculation and error checking.

Key Points: This plan item can be work flow directed to any service - work list of pharmacy in this case. If this were a radiology plan item it would be on the radiology work list etc etc.

We can define our own elements. I will chant this mantra again and again because it is so very powerful. If a piece of data is important enough to be in the logic whether it is

business or clinical logic then we should be able to read it in the emr.

Note the potential for work flow and productivity enhancement but for error checking as well - eg preventing prescription errors. It is estimated that 75,000 people die in the US

from prescriptions errors every year! We should be thinking Six Sigma level quality control for the University - we believe the XML medical record can help get us there.

1) I think we should have it by now - "Elements" and "Attributes" are pretty cool things.

Key Point: If there are 2 of these lab tests in the record we can start to have fun. Compare and contrast - read that graph etc - application languages can be implemented in XML eg graphml. Not only can we compare tests side by side or in graphs but with VETports xml based structure(<PElement name ="Glucose">) we could compare all glucose value no matter what test set they exist in!

Key Point: In this snippet there is lots of information and it was captured in seconds!