Web Service-based Healthcare Information System (WSHIS): A Case Study for System Interoperability Concern in Healthcare Field

A new distributed middleware technology 'Web services' is applied in the proposed healthcare information system (HIS) to address the issue of system and language interoperability raised from existing healthcare information systems. With the development of HISs, hospitals and healthcare institutes have been building various HISs for processing massive healthcare data, such as, systems built up for hospitals under the NHS (National Health Service) to manage patients' records. Nowadays many healthcare providers are willing to integrate their systems' functions and data for information sharing. This has raised concerns in data transmission, data security, and network limitation. Among these issues, system and language interoperability are one of most obvious issues since data and application integration is not an easy task due to differences in programming languages, system platforms, database management systems (DBMS) used within different systems. As a new distributed middleware technology, Web service brings an ideal solution to the issue of system and language interoperability. Web service has been approved to be very successful in many commercial applications (e.g. Amazon.com, Dell computer, etc.), however it is different to healthcare information system. As the result, Web service-based integrated healthcare information system (WSIHIS) is proposed to address the interoperability issue of existing HISs but also to introduce this new technology into the healthcare environment.