Integration of distributed healthcare records: publishing legacy data as XML documents compliant with CEN/TC251 ENV13606

To support co-operative work among health professionals and institutions it is necessary to share healthcare information about patients in a meaningful way. But, nowadays, in most hospitals health data are distributed across several information systems whose interconnection is difficult to achieve, this leads to the so-called islands of information. This paper briefly describes the architecture, design and implementation of the PANGEA system. PANGEA allows healthcare professionals to access patient information stored in heterogeneous autonomous information systems through a set of formal aggregates of health data based on the European pre-standard of Healthcare Record Architecture ENV13606 from CEN/TC251. ENV13606 is also used as canonical model for the representation of healthcare information, therefore the overall system can also be considered as a system for publishing legacy relational data as XML-Electronic Healthcare Records compliant with ENV13606.