Abstract:

Time information is an important aspect of a health information system. Health information cannot be represented and queried correctly without time in medical research, auditing, and medicolegal cases. Extensible Markup Language (XML) is being used in health information systems and has been formerly proposed as a data model for anaesthesia information systems. In this paper, we propose incorporating time into an XML model for anaesthesia information systems. A new storage structure and a temporal index structure are proposed in order to store temporal XML data and process time queries efficiently. In our proposed model, time has 4 dimensions: valid time, transaction time, event time, and availability time. We discuss the advantages of attaching the time information to the data in anaesthesia records. We implemented and tested the proposed model and the storage structures.

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