Development of clinical contents model markup language for electronic health records.

Objectives: To develop dedicated markup language for clinical contents models (CCM) to facilitate the active use of CCM in electronic health record systems.

Methods: Based on analysis of the structure and characteristics of CCM in the clinical domain, we designed extensible markup language (XML) based CCM markup language (CCML) schema manually.

Results: CCML faithfully reflects CCM in both the syntactic and semantic aspects. As this language is based on XML, it can be expressed and processed in computer systems and can be used in a technology-neutral way.

Conclusions: CCML HAS THE FOLLOWING STRENGTHS: it is machine-readable and highly human-readable, it does not require a dedicated parser, and it can be applied for existing electronic health record systems.