eHealth: Towards a Healthcare Service-Oriented Boundary-Less Infrastructure

Abstract

The current paper presents several interoperability features applied to a local distributed information system, CardioNET, meant to improve quality of healthcare services, through the use of the latest medical and IT&C technologies. Modern healthcare systems require a patient-centric vision, where patients must receive medical attention or treatment anytime, regardless of their physical location. The eHealth distributed system we present – CardioNET is based on a SOA producer-consumer model taking a patient centric approach where every hardware, software and medical activities become “services”. The system offers tools for remote interactions between patients, doctors, medical entities (e.g. hospitals, labs) and authorities. Based on international standards (IDC10, LOINC, HL7), the system assures interoperability and data exchange in widely accepted XML formats. A logical domain bus, called Pervasive Health Service Bus-pHSB, exchanges HL7 compliant data messages between the integrated elements of the platform, through high level protocols (SOAP/HL7). The paper addresses interoperability problems between medical informational platforms proposing an eHealth architecture composed of: - production systems (nodes): General Practitioner, Analysis Laboratories, Clinics, Hospitals, Home Health Care Units (H-HCU);- portal with specialized web services, registries and shared data repositories – distributed, boundary-less environment for decision support, research and educational activities.