Interoperability in Healthcare: Standards for the French project of a national personal medical record
Résumé
Many industrialized countries have entered in the realization of a personal medical record which will be the property of the patients. France has started the implementation of this system in accordance with the law of August 13 2004. The introduction of a new application intended to be used potentially by all the professionals of health of the country (consultation and update) raises a major problem of interoperability with all existing local medical records used in routine by the healthcare professionals who will not accept the constraints of a double data entry process. This paper describes the principal standards which were selected in France in order to answer this issue.