Model-driven virtualization of healthcare records

Abstract

This paper describes an approach to solving scalability, distribution and accessibility problems associated with large collections of healthcare records. The technique described in the paper explains how to exploit Model-Driven Healthcare record implementations of the Health Level Seven (HL7) standards for Clinical Documents (CDA) and Continuity of Care Documents (CCD), such as those developed by the Model-Driven Healthcare Tools (MDHT) project to quickly and easily enable highly scalable, distributed healthcare applications. The MDHT project has developed models in the Unified Modeling Language (UML) of the HL7 standard that it uses to automatically generate high quality software implementations of the standard. The technique described in the paper shows how to retarget this code generation process to automatically create an alternative implementation using a technology called Connected Data Objects (CDO). This new implementation immediately supports scalable, distributed access to document collections. The paper then goes on to describe example applications made possible by the new capabilities provided by the alternative implementation.