CONCLUSION: Although it is difficult to separate cleanly the evaluation of a theoretical model from its implementation, the empirical evaluation of the query-execution interface revealed that clinical queries of the kinds studied could all be represented and executed successfully. However, performance was a problem and this paper outlines some of the challenges faced in building generic components to handle specialised data structures on a large scale. The limitations of this work are also discussed. The work complements many years of European research and standardisation on the interoperable communication of electronic health records, by proposing a way in which one or more EHR systems might be queried in a standardised way.
PMID: 18614395 [PubMed – as supplied by publisher] (Source: ….