Your best bet would be the HL7 Reference Information Model (RIM) available as part of the HL7 v3 standards. It makes sense to use the RIM as the starting point since a lot of work has been done to define popular concepts such as patient, encounter, medication, observation... The RIM is designed to accomodate information elements that are ...

You put your finger where it hurts the most :-) But there is hope... Here are a few things to consider:The big players of today might not be the big players of tomorrow. They know that and you cannot win a market by holding information hostage. This is true not just for health, see what happened to Office file formats :-)Customers are demanding ...

First of all, let me congratulate you for being the first to post on this forum :-) In terms of patient record, there are several aspects to consider. Are you talking about the clinical repository structure of the clinical data exchange? In the first case you might want to consider the HL7 RIM as a source of your inspiration. I say inspiration ...