Collaborative Business Process Support in eHealth: Integrating IHE Profiles Through ebXML Business Process Specification Language

Integrating healthcare enterprise (IHE) specifies integration profiles describing selected real world use cases to facilitate the interoperability of healthcare information resources. While realizing a complex real-world scenario, IHE profiles are combined by grouping the related IHE actors. Grouping IHE actors implies that the associated business processes (IHE profiles) that the actors are involved must be combined, that is, the choreography of the resulting collaborative business process must be determined by deciding on the execution sequence of transactions coming from different profiles. There are many IHE profiles and each user or vendor may support a different set of IHE profiles that fits to its business need. However, determining the precedence of all the involved transactions manually for each possible combination of the profiles is a very tedious task. In this paper, we describe how to obtain the overall business process automatically when IHE actors are grouped. For this purpose, we represent the IHE profiles through a standard, machine-processable language, namely, Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) ebusiness eXtensible Markup Language (ebXML) Business Process Specification (ebBP) Language. We define the precedence rules among the transactions of the IHE profiles, again, in a machine-processable way. Then, through a graphical tool, we allow users to select the actors to be grouped and automatically produce the overall business process in a machine-processable format.

I. Introduction

Standards are necessary both for integration and for interoperability. However, any actual implementation of a standard requires some form of tailoring. Therefore, in developing practical and effective interoperability solutions, the industry relies on integration profiles that are business processes describing selected real-world use-cases. An important industry initiative, integrating healthcare enterprise (IHE) [1], has taken this profiling approach to achieve interoperability in the eHealth domain.