Using Agent and Workflow Technologies for the Implementation of Interoperable Healthcare Information Systems

Abstract

Healthcare is an increasingly collaborative enterprise involving many individuals and organizations that coordinate their efforts toward promoting quality and efficient delivery of healthcare through the use of interoperable healthcare information systems (HIS). Service-oriented architecture (SOA) provides a cost-effective solution to implementing interoperability between heterogeneous HIS which have resulted from extensive investments that most healthcare organizations have made in system resources over the course of many years. However, issues of semantic interoperability still remain unresolved while new challenges arise regarding web service interoperability. This chapter presents a mediator-based approach for achieving data and service interoperability among disparate and geographically dispersed HIS. The proposed system architecture provides a uniform interface to the underlying HIS, thus enabling decoupling of the client applications and the server-side implementations while it ensures security in all transactions. It is a distributed system architecture based on the agent paradigm for both healthcare process management and management of interactions among the participating systems. The healthcare processes and all interactions involved in each process are described according to the workflow metaphor. Thus, robustness, high flexibility and fault tolerance are provided in an environment as dynamic and heterogeneous as healthcare.