Specifications
Message overview
In a top-down approach and disregarding the detailed elements and attributes, a message KMEHR may, very roughly, be described as follows
- A kmehrmessage is composed of a header and non empty sequence of folders.
- The header identifies the sender and the receiver of the message.
- Each folder corresponds to a patient and is composed of a non empty sequence of transactions.
- Each transaction has an author (and a type). A transaction may be further structured within headings and items.
- A heading is rather a way of structuring the document underlying a transaction; headings should be viewed as ‘presentation indications’.
- An item corresponds to a ‘business concept’ such as a ‘contact person’ of a ‘risk factor’.
- The item contents may be in free text, in a predefined data type (e.g. date) or coded throughout the use of a reference table.
Those considerations are summarized in the following UML diagram.
Core concepts
We now follow a more bottom-up approach and describe the main elements that compose a kmehr message.