Axiomatic Selection of Health and Social Care Web Services on the Basis of Use Cases

Abstract

in recent years remote patient monitoring systems, which are conceived to monitor patient and store the recorded data, employ Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). In health care systems, if on the one hand the SOA features allow enriching the offer of services to patients and their families, on the other hand the problem arises of selecting the most appropriate set of web services for homogeneous groups of users or for each individual clinical case. In this paper, we propose a methodology based on the Axiomatic Design for the composition and selection of web services, which are based on the case stories studied, built using semi-structured interviews to different stakeholders involved in the care process. The proposed methodology detects in a systematic way all functional requirements by taking into account the different stakeholders involved in the process and their interactions. Thus, it identifies the interested actors for a specific health protocol, and consider all information to be exchanged and the Web Services to be implemented. The development of this methodology opens interesting scenarios even in areas not currently affected by such systems, such as health and safety at work for monitoring patients with chronic illnesses or for their work reintegration following acute clinical events. A specific case study is considered in order to illustrate the proposed approach.