Standardization of discharge reports with the ISO 13606 norm.

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has recently approved a new standard for the communication and semantic interoperability of electronic health record extracts. This standard is based on a dual model architecture, where a simple and generic reference model is defined for the representation of data and an archetype model is used for the representation of complex domain concepts of the electronic health record. By using this standard and a tool called LinkEHR-Ed, we have defined different types of hospital discharge reports in the form of archetypes and then we have normalized automatically discharge reports instances in a real environment following those archetype definitions. This work proves that it is possible to standardize legacy data automatically and enrich them with a semantic information layer by using archetypes as an integration and standardization mechanism.