The ability to share medical data with a variety of institutions has
come to the forefront of healthcare in the US and other countries.
Currently documents are being created for a variety of patient
encounters and reports. These documents are stored in large
central databases so that others may access them for their own use
as shown through the steps of Figure 1. When a clinician accesses
this registry of information they are able to search for all
documents available for any given patient. This is enabled by
Health Level 7(HL7) Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) [1]
standard which is an XML based version of the medical record
produced by HL7 and ANSI-accredited standards developing
organization for healthcare. Multiple types of CDA documents
exist, where there is often a lot of information, some duplicated,
among all these documents. In transport medicine, clinical
providers need quick access to relevant information about the
patient they are treating due to the time contingent environment in
which they work. In such an environment, providers may not have
the time or resources to sift through a large number of electronic
CDA documents in order to diagnose the patient or determine their
relevant past medical history as it relates to the current problem.
CDA documents might contain a variety of similar terms relating
to the same diagnosis repetitively, which may further delay critical
treatment of the patient population [2]. To date there has been no
proposal for a standardized search through this type of data,
especially a search that is meaningful and effective for the clinician
[3].