Title
Integrating Hospital Information Systems in Healthcare Institutions: A Mediation Architecture
Abstract
Many studies have examined the integration of information systems into healthcare institutions, leading to several standards in the healthcare domain (CORBAmed: Common Object Request Broker Architecture in Medicine; HL7: Health Level Seven International; DICOM: Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine; and IHE: Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise). Due to the existence of a wide diversity of heterogeneous systems, three essential factors are necessary to fully integrate a system: data, functions and workflow. However, most of the previous studies have dealt with only one or two of these factors and this makes the system integration unsatisfactory. In this paper, we propose a flexible, scalable architecture for Hospital Information Systems (HIS). Our main purpose is to provide a practical solution to insure HIS interoperability so that healthcare institutions can communicate without being obliged to change their local information systems and without altering the tasks of the healthcare professionals. Our architecture is a mediation architecture with 3 levels: 1) a database level, 2) a middleware level and 3) a user interface level. The mediation is based on two central components: the Mediator and the Adapter. Using the XML format allows us to establish a structured, secured exchange of healthcare data. The notion of medical ontology is introduced to solve semantic conflicts and to unify the language used for the exchange. Our mediation architecture provides an effective, promising model that promotes the integration of hospital information systems that are autonomous, heterogeneous, semantically interoperable and platform-independent.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1007/s10916-011-9797-8
J. Medical Systems
Keywords
Field
DocType
Hospital information systems, Interoperability, Mediation, Design patterns, Ontology, XML
Information system,Middleware,Data mining,Interoperability,Computer security,Computer science,Knowledge management,Workflow,System integration,World Wide Web,Common Object Request Broker Architecture,Local information systems,User interface
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
36
5
1573-689X
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
3
0.42
8
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ikram El Azami152.23
Mohammed Ouçamah Cherkaoui Malki230.42
Christian Tahon318215.61