XMLGuide - The Medical Guidelines & Protocols Solution (2002)

MiArt received a DTI SMART Award for Innovation 2002

DTi SMART Award

In 2002 MiArt received a DTI SMART Award for a feasibility study which explored the possibility of developing an XML based guideline and protocol system for use by healthcare professionals in clinical environments.

The press releases can be found here

The SMART Award part of the project ran for the first six months of 2002, with additional work and resources being allocated up to the end of 2002.

What was XMLGuide?

XMLGuide was a system for storing, editing and displaying medical guideline documents and protocols through a web browser. It was intended to be installed as part of an intranet or extranet, or to run as a web site.

XML is used to 'mark up' content using tags like HTML (to which it is related), but unlike HTML the tags can hold meaning (i.e. they are not just for content formatting such as bold and italic). This gives XML much of the power of a database, whilst the documents remain both human readable and exchangeable across different systems. XML is also extensible - which means you define your own tags flexibly.

XMLGuide function diagram

What are XMLGuide's key benefits?

For healthcare organisations:

  • Rapid dissemination of up to date best practice guidelines to clinical staff, enabling consistent care delivery

For local guideline managers and authors:

  • Rapid publishing process
  • Adoption and editing of national guidelines distributed and imported in XML format
  • Encoding of Guidlines using MeSH.

For IT staff:

  • A system running on familiar Windows operating systems using IIS
  • A one off setup process for the differing XML document shapes
  • Low total ownership costs

For clinical users:

  • Easy to navigate clinical guidelines accessible across a range of platforms through a web browser interface
  • Fully searchable documents
  • Document copies can be easily printed from the screen for reference

What technologies did XMLGuide utilise?

A proof of concept was originally developed using Microsoft ASP for the web frontend, running on Window NT Server. The backend technology was written in VC++ and Visual Basic and utilised COM technologies. The system incorporated a MeSH browser, also written in Visual Basic and developed for MiArt by Medical Object Oriented Software Enterprises Limited. In the latter stages of the project the front end was re-written as an ASP.NET application in C#.

Was XMLGuide deployed in Live environments?

The proof of concept was deployed at two hospitals in mid 2002 with the trials running for around 6 months.

Was XMLGuide developed further?

XMLGuide was not taken further than the proof of concept stage, due in no small part to the growth of the National Program for IT (later known as Connecting for Health) and the governments plans to incorporate clinical guideline creation and deployment into the program.

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