Development Of Medical Information Integration Technology Based On Virtual Printing

With the rapid development of medical informatics in China, more and more medical information systems have been implemented in hospitals by different vendors in recent15years, which results in the heterogeneity of medical information systems. To integrate medical information from different kinds of medical information systems has been recognized as a critical issue in building a comprehensive digital hospital.Though there are several medical information system integration methods, they are still limited in the integration of legacy medical information systems which implemented in the early stage. Specifically, there are still a large number of medical data in private formats generated from these systems, data sharing and data exchange is difficult. On the other hand, the legacy medical information systems are always stand-alone, which means they neither have system integration interfaces nor support opened medical communication standards, leading that they cannot be integrated with other systems.To address this issue, a medical information integration technology based on virtual printing is proposed in this thesis. The major works include:1) To develop a PDF virtual printer for medical information systems. Compared and analyzed the implementation methods of virtual printing technology, implemented printing data capture method based on virtual printing, and investigated PDF document generating technologies, designed and developed a PDF virtual printer for medical information systems, so that medical information from medical information systems can be shared in the form of PDF documents.2) To extract medical information from virtual printing interface. An information extraction method based on template matching was designed, which realized classification extraction of medical information such as text, graphic and image. Then the medical information was formally expressed via CDA standard, which can realize information sharing, information exchange and comprehensive utilization in the form of CDA documents.3) To design and develop medical information integration technology based on virtual printing. The overall application framework of medical information integration based on virtual printing was discussed and the detailed implementation and application in ECG Information System was carried out to verify the availability and feasibility of the proposed medical information integration technology based on virtual printing.The proposed work indicates that the presented medical information integration technology based on virtual printing is feasible, and provides a reference for solving the information integration of legacy medical information systems in hospital.