Abstract
BackgroundHealthcare relies on health information systems (HISs) to support the care and receive reimbursement for the care provided. Healthcare providers experience many problems with their HISs due to improper architecture design. To support the design of a proper HIS architecture, a reference architecture (RA) can be used that meets the various stakeholder concerns of HISs. Therefore, the objective of this study is to develop and analyze an RA following well-established architecture design methods.MethodsDomain analysis was performed to scope and model the domain of HISs. For the architecture design, we applied the views and beyond approach and designed the RA’s views based on the stakeholders and features from the domain analysis. We evaluated the RA with a case study.ResultsWe derived the following four architecture views for HISs: The context diagram, decomposition view, layered view, and deployment view. Each view shows the architecture of the HIS from a different angle, suitable for various stakeholders. Based on a Japanese hospital information system study, we applied the RA and derived the application architecture.ConclusionWe demonstrated that the methods of the software architecture design community could be used in the healthcare domain effectively and showed the applicability of the RA.
Highlights
Healthcare relies on health information systems (HISs) to support the care and receive reimbursement for the care provided
Domain scoping HISs cover a wide range of sub-domains within healthcare
Many HIS papers focus on the hospital subdomain [7, 42, 47], others focus on the primary care [10], pediatrics [43], outpatient care [45, 47], and diabetes care [49]
Summary
Healthcare relies on health information systems (HISs) to support the care and receive reimbursement for the care provided. Healthcare providers experience many problems with their HISs due to improper architecture design. Healthcare relies on health information systems (HISs) to support various care processes and receive reimbursement for the care provided. Lack of interoperability resulting in care professionals having difficulty communicating files [4, 5]. Other studies on HISs reported problems with poor interface design [6, 7], poor security [8, 9], missing features [10, 11], lack of professional. Because HISs consist of many interrelated software modules that should communicate, coordinate, and evolve over time [16], the software architecture is critical in HIS design. Bass et al [17] define the software architecture of a program or a computing system as: “The structure of the system, which comprises software elements, the externally visible properties of those elements, and the relationships among them.” The software architecture supports communication on the system, guides design decisions, informs maintenance, and facilitates architectural analysis of the overall system [18]
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