Title:	A MEDICAL INTEROPERABILITY ARCHITECTURE
Author(s):	Bruno Alves, Michael Schumacher
ISBN:	978-972-8939-16-8
Editors:	Mário Macedo
Year:	2010
Edition:	Single
Keywords:	Interoperability; Security; eHealth; Healthcare; Component-based system development; Service Oriented Architecture; Information system architecture.
Type:	Full Paper
First Page:	35
Last Page:	43
Language:	English
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Full Contents:	click to dowload
Paper Abstract:	Interoperability has the potential to improve care processes and decrease costs of the healthcare system. The advent of enterprise ICT solutions to replace costly and error-prone paper-based records did not fully convince practitioners, and many still prefer traditional methods for their simplicity and relative security. In this context, the MediCoordination research project proposes a Service-Oriented Architecture, combining a totally decentralized storage for patient records and a federated metadata infrastructure allowing semantic descriptions of medical documents. While taking a complementary approach to Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) IT Profiles, among which IHE XDS, we were able to design an enterprise-level architecture based on the recommendations of the recent Swiss eHealth strategy on architecture components and standards. The Medicoordination Healthcare Infrastructure presented in this paper provides enough scalability to fit the fragmented nature of the Swiss healthcare industry. The component-based nature of its architecture enables a good separation of roles between storage and resource description, while enabling reusability in other projects. A prototype is implemented and deployed; and while partially incomplete, it already provides encouraging results in terms of security, scalability and efficiency. Experimental results highlight document storage and retrieval times in the range of milliseconds.
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