Dynamic Health Level Seven Packetizer for on-the-fly integrated healthcare enterprises in disaster zones

Abstract

The advent of standards such as IEEE 11073 for device connectivity, Health Level Seven (HL7) etc., provide an assimilating platform for medical devices and seamless dataflow among modern health information systems (HIS). However, to date, these standards are either not widely accepted or lack the support of 'on-the-fly' formation of HIS in a disaster zone. In a situation where hybrid medical (standard compliant and the otherwise) devices are in operation, incomplete and ambiguous data can lead to fatal misconduct on the part of technology. In order to eliminate this problem, we propose a HL7 compliant policy engine in support of HL7 Reference Information Model (RIM). The policy engine is used for rich policy expression, vivid XML policies for HL7 compliant devices, and performance enhancement. Due to the dynamic nature of on-the-fly HIS in a disaster zone, it is very costly to manage the change and keep track of authentic HIS devices. We use Java language to extend the HL7 RIM in order to create/modify policies instead of scripting languages to overcome the complexity and interoperability.