No abstract

Health Information Systems (HIS) are complex systems which present many difficulties in their development. From the software engineering point of view, among the difficulties for HIS development are the necessity of managing and controlling data that must be held for decades, even considering the evolution of technology in the following years, as well as the necessity of cooperating with legacy systems and describing the needs and concerns of a variety of stakeholders. Considering the domain, HIS deal with human life, and errors during software development, management and operation can be catastrophic. These concerns are relevant from the software architecture point of view. Therefore, developing HIS based on a solid software architecture is a success factor that cannot be neglected. However, the processes related to the software architecture of HIS are often considered only from low level of abstraction, even for software architecture description. The ISO/IEC/IEEE 42020 defines 6 clauses for architecture process, among them the Architecture Conceptualization process is the subject of this paper. Given the importance of establishing a well-defined software architecture, and considering the difficulties of understanding an architectural standard, and also considering that ISO/IEC/IEEE 42020 has only recently been published, we propose a framework for using the Architecture Conceptualization clause, which leverages high level concepts and elements of software architecture. A case study on a HIS is described.