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Biomedical subjects

F Laforest

Publications and source records attributed to F Laforest.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

Medical records and electronic documents: a proposal.

This article presents a global view of our proposal for a medical information system of the future. This information system focuses on patient medical records management. As most of the existing systems, it proposes to store information from patient records in a database. But records capture is different: we propose to use weakly-structured documents. Such documents contain paragraphs with some specific constraints represented by XML tags. The end-user writes new information under the form of weakly-structured documents. An internal system translates theses documents into new data for the internal database. Such a document-based user interface provides much more freedom to the end-user, and certainly reduces the distance between the physicians' way of working and the capture system.

Database Management Systems↗

The electronic medical record: using documents for information capture.

This work concerns the management of electronic medical records. Classical systems based on databases do not satisfy end users, as the provided capture forms are never completely adapted to the patient case and to the physician's way of working. Electronic documents proved to be a better user interface paradigm, but still do not provide satisfying querying performance. Our work concerns the use of semi-structured documents as a user interface for a database-based system. The captured documents are analyzed so that information is extracted and used to fill in a database. We illustrate our proposition with the prototype we have developed and a short example.

Data Collection↗

Medical record management systems: criticisms and new perspectives.

The first generation of computerized medical records stored the data as text, but these records did not bring any improvement in information manipulation. The use of a relational database management system (DBMS) has largely solved this problem as it allows for data requests by using SQL. However, this requires data structuring which is not very appropriate to medicine. Moreover, the use of templates and icon user interfaces has introduced a deviation from the paper-based record (still existing). The arrival of hypertext user interfaces has proven to be of interest to fill the gap between the paper-based medical record and its electronic version. We think that further improvement can be accomplished by using a fully document-based system. We present the architecture, advantages and disadvantages of classical DBMS-based and Web/DBMS-based solutions. We also present a document-based solution and explain its advantages, which include communication, security, flexibility and genericity.

Database Management Systems↗

A hypermedia-based medical records management system.

This article presents a new way to manage computerized medical records, based on a totally-hypermedia system. As a matter of fact, the classical use of a database limits the necessary variability of the medical record, in function of both the patient profile and the care practitioner habits. The system we propose is based on a hospital Intranet, and on the XML language. This language allows the definition of semantic tags in hyperdocuments, and thus information retrieval is ensured through semantic tags indexation.

Computer Communication Networks↗

[Proposals for a system of managing medical information].

Various systems are being used for managing medical information. They have several shortcomings. Among these, one can quote: -they do not overcome the complex medical terminology and its diversity; -they do not use a common medical language -there is no easy communication between the softwares used -and so on The proposed system takes into account the multiplicity of information sources within a hospital and the need for individual decision-making from care providers.

Delivery of Health Care↗