A document processing architecture for electronic medical records.

An Electronic Medical Record System (EMRS) requires a deep analysis of the clinical workplace and of the character and uses of the medical record itself. Charts are a diverse and useful collection of loosely structured specialized documents, each with an orderly outline, but widely divergent and unpredictable contents--the more critical the case, the more unpredictable the details. This can be achieved by adapting an underlying information architecture that is based on document processing (rather than data processing), using the logic and conventions of text tagging, as in Mosaic, the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), and HyTime.