VideoThe questions began several years ago, when Johns Hopkins Medical Center started making all of its patient records available electronically, on a new, $2 million system. Recalls Stephanie Reel, vice president for information services: "As soon as we started to populate the electronic patient records with new documents, people started saying, 'All that information is great, but why can't we have the clinic notes in the electronic patient records also?' And then, 'Why can't we have the problem reports in the electronic patient records?'"
The problem is, care providers, claims processors, and quality-assurance experts all need access to patient data, but all need different views of that data, says Reel. Right now, they don't have a simple, universal way for their computers to locate and retrieve exactly the information they have to see.
In the future, they will. It's called Extensible Markup Language, or XML. Completed in 1998 by the World Wide Web Consortium (usually referred to as the W3C), XML provides a way for content providers to add "tags" to their text, to indicate how it is being used. "What XML allows you to do is richly define the data you already have," says Joshua Walker, an analyst at Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc., an information technology advisory firm.
At Johns Hopkins, clinic notes, problem reports, and other information are being added to all the records in the system. The medical center expects to save $2 for every $1 spent on the system. According to Reel, all the information will be tagged with XML, which should substantially improve access to it and, consequently, improve patient care.
The situation at Johns Hopkins is a microcosm of what's happening everywhere, as more and more data is being stored and made available as content in corporate databases and, especially, on the World Wide Web. The standard markup language of the Internet, HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), uses tags to tell a Web browser how information should be presented on a computer screen. But HTML says nothing about the information itself.
XML, on the other hand, enables a computer to identify the kind of information received, whether it's a purchase order, a medical record, or a customer query. Platform independent, it seems destined to become a universal format for data exchange, which has led some observers to call it an Esperanto for the Internet. The implications for electronic commerce and communication are enormous.
Finding Needles in Haystacks
XML will transform document and information management, too. Take this article, which is also archived on CFO magazine's Web site. If you wanted to find it and other articles like it, how would you do that? A simple search of "Johns Hopkins" with an Internet search engine might turn up more than 100,000 "hits," or matches on Web pages; one of them might be this article. If you added a few extra terms to your search request, such as "magazine," you could narrow the search considerably.
But when Web documents contain standardized XML tags, the references to Johns Hopkins in a CFO story might be tagged as "a user story in a magazine article." A search engine in, say, 2005 might be able to classify "Johns Hopkins" hits according to their XML tags, or allow you to search for specific tags. Thus, retrieving only Web pages containing articles like this one would be a cinch.
Today, however, XML tags are still in the initial stages of being standardized. The process is being driven by a variety of standards bodies, industry groups, and companies. Just about every major software vendor has announced its support for the new language.
The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants is creating an XML-based specification for the preparation and exchange of financial information, which the institute expects will be accepted throughout Corporate America. This would make it possible for application software to easily recognize any financial statement and know what it means.
"Accounting is the language of business," says Barry Melancon, president and CEO of the AICPA, "and [XML tags] will make it easier to share information expressed in that language by permitting computer applications to understand our vocabulary."
Sharing information is what makes XML so powerful. "Companies need to think about what information they want to distribute and exactly which people are going to get it, with a high level of security, and [about] how that's going to change their business," states Timothy S. Sloane, analyst at Boston-based consultancy Aberdeen Group Inc. "XML lets you distribute information securely at a much lower cost."
A Replacement for EDI
Not surprisingly, electronic commerce is drawing all the attention as the most important potential application for XML, since XML enables trading partners to exchange information easily and inexpensively.
Prior to XML, the only standard way for business partners to exchange documents electronically was through electronic data interchange (EDI). The advantages and limitations of EDI are well known. It was developed in the 1980s as a way for businesses to exchange purchase orders, invoices, and other documents. In the early 1990s, EDI became a source of controversy as Wal-Mart and other large retailers forced their suppliers to use it, despite the substantial programming expense to implement each relationship, and the communications expense of transmitting the electronic documents over expensive value- added networks (VANs). But EDI has never really taken off, despite years of effort.
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