HL7 clinical document architecture to share cardiological images and structured data in next generation infrastructure

In medicine and in cardiology different standards are used for treatment of clinical and iconographic information. Among the most relevant there are HL7 for clinical data and DICOM for images and signals. The advent of Electronic Health Record Systems (EHR) and the request for data integration coming from different imaging modalities and diagnostic instrumentation, offer us a technological panorama difficult to manage. There is an increasing demand to select the most meaningful information in a simple and effective way, without the duty and the necessity to create from scratch new ways of data communication and sharing. Hence an agreement, in order to be able to feed a new multidisciplinary information databases, is necessary. To reach this goal, we used the emergent development of HL7 in the field of the structure of Clinical Document Architecture (CDA).