Abstract
This paper describes the use of a new distributed middleware technology ‘Web Services’ in the proposed Healthcare Information System (HIS) to address the issue of system interoperability raised from existing Healthcare Information systems. With the development of HISs, hospitals and healthcare institutes have been building their own HISs for processing massive healthcare data, such as, systems built up for hospitals under the NHS (National Health Service) to manage patients’ records. Nowadays many healthcare providers are willing to integrate their systems’ functions and data for information sharing. This has raised concerns in data transmission, data security and network limitation. Among these issues, system and language interoperability are one of most obvious issues since data and application integration is not an easy task due to differences in programming languages, system platforms, Database Management Systems (DBMS) used within different systems. As a new distributed middleware technology, Web service brings an ideal solution to the issue of system and language interoperability. Web service has been approved to be very successful in many commercial applications (e.g. Amazon.com, Dell computer, etc.), however it is different to healthcare information system. As the result, Web Service-based Integrated Healthcare Information System (WSIHIS) is proposed to address the interoperability issue of existing HISs but also to introduce this new technology into the healthcare environment.
Highlights
With the evolution of IT technologies and increasing demands from people for computerising medical-related information, healthcare institutions have developed systems to manage and process the large amount of medical information
Web Service-based Integrated Healthcare Information System (WSIHIS) is built upon Microsoft .Net platform and Web service plays a role of middleware
National Program for IT (NpfIT) is aiming to integrate most of healthcare systems and services based in England and Wales
Summary
With the evolution of IT technologies and increasing demands from people for computerising medical-related information, healthcare institutions have developed systems to manage and process the large amount of medical information. Web service as a new distributed middleware technology can overcome those shortages from CORBA/DCOM and to successfully address the issue of system and language interoperability. The Web services technology allows any piece of software to communicate with each other in a standardised XML messaging systems[6,9,23]. It solves and eliminates above issues of DCOM/CORBA[23]. Patients’ files are required if the infection is developed in later stage They would require an information system to manage and process these massive health data, as the patient, the hospital and the rehabilitation centre and prosthesis are normally not in same location.
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