A specification of medical markup language for exchanging computerized patient record: MML ver. 1

Medical Markup Language (MML) is a SGML-based language to describe clinical data exchanged between hospitals or clinics. In this paper, a specification of MML ver. 1.0 is introduced. In the MML, since only the protocols of sixth and seventh layer under OSI communication model are defined according to SGML standard, the data may be transferred via any protocol, i.e.; e-mail or FTP. Those who send clinical data to other hospitals have to convert the data from the original format into MML, and the receivers have to convert the MML into the receiver-specific format, or browse using a kind of MML viewer. In version 1.0 of MML laboratory data are represented according to the HL7 standard and image data are represented in DICOM format and TIFF format etc. These data are referenced from MML using external referencing mechanism in SGML standard.