Information integration is still a crucial issue in healthcare applications. Most clinical applications are determined by a huge variety of heterogeneous and independent work places, most of them equipped with specialized clinical hardware. Due to this it is almost impossible -at least not feasible -to run a common database system storing all relevant data of a clinical application. Nevertheless these clinical applications have to share their data. Our solution to this integration problem is to facilitate so called Process based Data Logistics. This approach is based on the integration capabilities of process management; however it does not coordinate the staff working in the healthcare domain in a restricting sense, but coordinates data sources and data sinks of these applications.

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Healthcare applications are demanding with respect to their IT needs. Due to their complexity they need strong IT support which must provide enough freedom to their users in the medical domain because of the high degree of flexibility required by them. We have chosen a process based technology, called data logistics, which can cope with these almost conflicting requirements. Data logistics is based on clinical processes. However, when data logistics processes are executed, this happens transparently to the users and provides them a huge degree of freedom in determining the sequence of process execution. In order to cope with these challenging features, the process execution environment for data logistics processes is generated according to our model driven development approach called process driven architecture (PDA). Several clinical studies illustrate the feasibility, effectiveness, and efficiency of the data logistics approach. This article both exposes the rationale of the data logistics approach and provides a deep inside into the implementation concepts.

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