Toward Integrating Healthcare Data and Systems

Abstract

The adoption of health information systems and the integration of healthcare data and systems into efficient cross-institutional collaboration workflows of stakeholders (e.g., medical providers such as physicians, hospitals, clinics, labs, etc.) is a challenging problem for the healthcare domain. This chapter studies the way that well-established software engineering concepts and architectural styles can be employed to satisfy requirements of the healthcare domain and ease health information exchange (HIE) between stakeholders. Towards this goal, this chapter proposes a hybrid HIE architecture (HHIEA) that leverages the studied styles that include service-oriented architecture, grid computing, publish/subscribe paradigm, and data warehousing to allow the health information systems of stakeholders to be integrated to facilitate collaboration among medical providers. To demonstrate the feasibility and utility of the HHIEA, a realistic regional healthcare scenario is introduced that illustrates the interactions of stakeholders across an integrated collection of health information systems.