Patient information and clinical documentation at the Dallas facility were stored in service-specific applications throughout the Baylor system. Registration, laboratory, radiology, and transcription information separately resided on different and discrete platforms. Instead of struggling with retrieving information through Baylor's disparate applications, physicians often relied on paper documentation. In this case, as documents were received, they would be printed by the office staff and then manually filed in the patient's chart. In addition to being an effective technology for normalizing disparate application data and establishing an interoperable information environment, XML also provides a great deal of value for managing the discrete data elements contained within an XML document or object.
Information acquired by the portal is cached as metadata or actual XML content.
Once information is acquired, it is categorized by the portal's indexing engine, which gives users the ability to conduct highly accurate, context-sensitive searches. For example, finding records for a patient named Smith, only when it's the Smith being treated by Dr. Jones for asthma. The portal further shortcuts the information retrieval process by providing users with content summaries. The screen shot in Figure 1 illustrates an example of an AXO, which is a consolidated patient record including lab results and links to specific transcription files. With content summaries, the need to drill down into multiple documents to manually extract specific nuggets of relevant information is alleviated.