Consortium hopes to make it easier to move data online

Johns Hopkins and medical societies seek to develop Web standards to foster medical collaboration, education and data exchange.

By Tyler Chin, AMNews staff. June 11, 2001.

Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions and several medical societies have formed an international consortium to develop Web-based technical standards and software tools to advance medical collaboration and education online. The hope is that this project will make it easier for physicians and others to share data.

The 16-member MedBiquitous Consortium, which includes medical societies representing more than 400,000 doctors, will develop a common XML medical vocabulary. Short for extensible markup language, XML is a Web standard that adds structure and intelligence to data and documents.

The consortium Web site (http://www.medbiq.org/) also plans to develop XML-based software tools for several applications, including online courses, surveys, discussion forums, instant messaging, abstract submission, clinical trials and reporting of clinical outcomes and medical error data.

If those tools and XML vocabulary are adopted by organized medicine and firms that sell technology services to the health care industry, they will help solve the problem of information systems that can't exchange data with each other, said Peter S. Greene, MD, associate dean for emerging technologies at Johns Hopkins and the consortium's executive director. [...]