Healthcare information system integration: a service oriented approach

System integration has been always the most important issue for the development of informatization in healthcare industry. The formulation and popularization of HL7 and DICOM, the healthcare data exchange standards, have greatly improved sharing extent of healthcare information, but they are not enough to solve the problem of workflow integration. The IHE technical framework has promoted the workflow integration by specifying the implementation mode of HL7 and DICOM, and its essential idea and the initiative, designed for hospital workflow and dataflow, provide a practical guidelines, but we could not be forced to conform to the way IHE specified in many real cases. Based on the IHE technical framework, the authors try to present a service oriented way of healthcare information integration in this paper.