OBJECTIVE: For disease prevention and health promotion, it is important that individual health information is managed continuously and can be retrieved easily when necessary. We propose a model for integrated management of diverse individual health information that is generated and managed in heterogeneous Health Information System(HIS)s at hospitals or health centers.

METHODS: We use XML and relational database together to represent the health information structurally and manage it flexibly. In order to show the effectiveness of our method, we developed a prototype of Intermediate System for integration and analysed the result.

RESULTS: The Intermediate System for integration provides the schema of health information, represents the information in forms of XML strings by the subjects, and stores each XML string as one field of relational database. In each heterogeneous HIS, there is an adaptor that transforms the health information into XML according to the schema. The messages for transmission between each HIS and Intermediate System are represented in XML.

CONCLUSION: The experimental study shows that using relational database and XML together provides a flexible, extensible and structured way of representing complex, dynamic, structurally-variant and large-scale information, on the premise that the database tables are partitioned or distributed according to the status of server.