A framework for data management in healthcare information-management systems

Information and communication technology (ICT) plays an essential role in supporting daily life in today's digital society, being used everywhere, including in the delivery of better and more efficient healthcare services. Data come from several separate medical devices, from sensors located near the patient that provide environmental data, from electronic medical records stored by the hospital, from hospital administrative information, and from financial and healthcare resource management. Use of health-information technology should lead to more efficient, safer, and higher-quality care. A new scheme for cooperation between data, devices, and systems is needed. Adopting a service-oriented architecture (SOA) approach to implementing large, complex software systems like e-health integration solutions allows us to effectively address the fundamental challenge of ensuring that these systems are adaptable, flexible, and reliable. The functionality of the e-health integration platform should be accessible as a set of generic services, available independently on demand. Our framework’s major contribution is to design middleware based on the dynamic module system for Java known as OSGi technology. OSGi technology provides the standardized primitives that allow applications to be constructed from small, reusable, collaborative components that can be composed into an application and deployed. Our framework promises to seamlessly integrate various products, including Message Broker, Web Services Application Server, Enterprise Service Bus, and Business Process Server.