TY  - CONF
T1  - A medical interoperability architecture
A1  - Alves, Bruno
A1  - Schumacher, Michael
TI  - Proceedings of the IADIS International Conference e-Health 2010
Y1  - 2010
CY  - Freiburg, Germany
KW  - Component-based system development
KW  - eHealth
KW  - Healthcare
KW  - Interoperability
KW  - Security
KW  - Service Oriented
N2  - Interoperability has the potential to improve care processes and decrease costs of the healthcare system. The advent of enterprise ICT solutions to replace costly and error-prone paper-based records did not fully convince practitioners, and many still prefer traditional methods for their simplicity and relative security. In this context, the MediCoordination research project proposes a Service-Oriented Architecture, combining a totally decentralized storage for patient records and a federated metadata infrastructure allowing semantic descriptions of medical documents. While taking a complementary approach to Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) IT Profiles, among which IHE XDS, we were able to design an enterprise-level architecture based on the recommendations of the recent Swiss eHealth strategy on architecture components and standards. The Medicoordination Healthcare Infrastructure presented in this paper provides enough scalability to fit the fragmented nature of the Swiss healthcare industry. The component-based nature of its
architecture enables a good separation of roles between storage and resource description, while enabling reusability in other projects. A prototype is implemented and deployed; and while partially incomplete, it already provides encouraging results in terms of security, scalability and efficiency. Experimental results highlight document storage and retrieval times in the range of milliseconds.
ER  -