Healthcare Interoperability: CDA Documents Consolidation using Transport Record Summary (TRS) Construction

Thanks to recent medical record standards and distributed technology, the exchange of medical documents has become readily available.Healthcare institutions are able to share documents with other providers and specialty care facilities as well as third party billing vendors and pharmacies; however, patients who require medical transport are still subject to rudimentary exchange of information through verbal reports and outdated hand written medical notes. An ongoing exchange of medical documents between patient transport units and the facilities they serve would help reduce medical errors. Our approach searches for available documents that are relevant to the patients’ current conditions based on medical coding within these documents, clinical document architecture (CDA) documents, using HL7 message exchange mechanism in SOAP envelopes. These CDA documents are then consolidated into a single transport record summary (TRS) document to filter out redundancies and provide destination medical service provider with the most pertinent information that is readily accessible to both human and machine. In a time critical environment, access to multiple documents from difference sources is not likely feasible. For this reason, we proposes a CDA document consolidation tool, the TRS Constructor, which creates a TRS by querying and analyzing patient’s multiple CDA documents. The new TRS will be registered into the Health In-formation Exchange (HIE) environment for cross-reference across healthcare facilities and other providers.