Leveraging Software-Defined Networking (SDN) Capabilities For Improving Health Information Exchange (HIE) Systems Performance

Abstract

Having updated information about a patient and the storage of such information are problems of importance the health care industry has been trying to address. The health care industry partly solved this problem with the use of Health Information Exchange (HIE) Systems. One of the most useful features of HIE systems is their capability to change the destination of a client’s request when a target server is down (automatic fail-over). Nevertheless they have a major flaw in that HIE systems can not modify the target server when the path to the said server is congested. We attempt to address this problem with the use of Software Defined Networking (SDN). Armed with a global view of the network, an HIE system integrated with SDN can modify, not just the path to a target server, but also the chosen target server itself. Our experiments show that our approach can double the performance of the default HIE system when there is network congestion.