The report proposes that health data be broken down into the smallest
individual pieces that make sense to exchange or aggregate. These data
elements would be accompanied by a mandatory “metadata tag” that
describes the data, the patient’s preferences around the data and
required security and privacy protections.
Universal exchange languages for metadata description, called
“extensible mark-up languages” are widely used in other industry
areas.
http://www.govhealthit.com/newsitem.aspx?nid=75615
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