Authors:
Nikitas N. Karanikolas
1
;
Christos Skourlas
1
;
Maria Nitsiou
2
and
Emmanuel J. Yannakoudakis
2
Affiliations:
1
Technological Educational Institution of Athens, Greece
;
2
Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece
Keyword(s):
Hospital Information Systems, Electronic Patient Records, Dynamic databases’ schema evolution, correlating heterogeneous data.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Coupling and Integrating Heterogeneous Data Sources
;
Databases and Information Systems Integration
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Information Systems Analysis and Specification
;
Legacy Systems
;
Multimedia Database Applications
;
Software Engineering
Abstract:
Today, there is an increased trend for Electronic Patient Records (EPR) incorporating and correlating heterogeneous information imported from various sources and from different medical applications. New possibilities are also given by the rapid technological progress and the development of independent software applications and tools that handle multimedia medical data. Moreover, users (e.g. doctors, nurses) often prefer to use general purpose software (e.g. word processors) and specific applications and tools for organizing and accessing medical data and they only partially use Hospital Information Systems (HIS). Therefore, it is necessary for the HIS to provide the capability for encapsulating in their EPR externally created information. Dynamic evolution of the HIS must also be supported by flexible Database schemata. In this paper, we conclude that modern HIS should be designed and implemented using database management systems offering new enhanced database models and manipulation
languages. Eventually, we describe and discuss how to use the Frame Database Model (FDB) and the new Conceptual Universal Database Language (CUDL) for supporting dynamic schema evolution and covering the needs of the users.
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