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.

Medical data transformation using rewriting

“…The general area of data integration in life sciences, especially based on a data federation, has seen many contributions in the last 10 years. Many of the efforts such as (Louie et al, 2007 ; Azami et al, 2012 ) have focused on a mediated approach to data integration. In recent years the idea of integrating disparate health or biomedical datasets based on a common data model has gained ground.…”

Towards Data Exchange between Health Information System and Insurance Claims Management System

“…The advancement of technology has led to the development of many health information systems which are cost-effective, reliable, scalable and flexible. The main goal of HIS is to improve information flow within health institutions without altering task to health-care practitioners [8].…”

Standardization and alignment of data capture practices to clinical processes in the evaluation of living kidney donor candidates

“…14 Safe exchange of PHI to maximize productivity in this area is often encouraged. 15 By participating in data sharing agreements with other programs or health agencies, standardized data from sources such as CLiKeD can be used to guide medical decisions on donor suitability and assess health outcomes. Moreover, data from sources such as CLiKeD may facilitate the availability and usage of big data within new technologies.…”