Abstract A Lightweight Approach to Interoperable Health Information Exchange

The ability to electronically exchange health information among different facilities or organizations has significant potential to improve patient care and reduce the costs of that care. However, the only approaches currently known to support this exchange of information are either expensive or dependent on a centralized repository of data. We propose instead to use existing Web technology to develop a lightweight and relatively inexpensive mechanism for exchanging information that allows organizations to maintain their records independently but supports requests from other organizations for information to be fulfilled