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, amednews 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.

While the consortium's work won't be readily visible to physicians, it will nonetheless benefit them because it will make it easier for them to find information and collaborate online, said Dr. Greene, a cardiac surgeon at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.

The nonprofit consortium will fund its work partly through a $5,000 annual membership fee. For that fee, members will be able to help shape standards and obtain software tools developed by the consortium. The consortium also has a for-profit arm -- MedBiquitous Services Inc.-- that will provide Web hosting and consulting services.

Consortium members include the American Academy of Family Physicians, American Academy of Pediatrics, American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, American Academy of Gastroenterology, American Society of Clinical Oncology, Council of Medical Specialty Societies, American Academy of Ophthalmology; American College of Radiology; Cardiothoracic Surgery Network, European Assn. for Cardio-Thoracic Surgery, Society for Vascular Surgery, International Council of Ophthalmology and American Heart Assn. Other members are Johns Hopkins, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, and UNITAR, a virtual university in Malaysia.