Christian Meiler

Towards a flexible, process-oriented IT architecture for an integrated healthcare network

Healthcare information systems play an important role in improving healthcare quality. As providing healthcare increasingly changes from isolated treatment episodes towards a continuous medical process involving multiple healthcare professionals and institutions, there is an obvious need for an information system to support processes and span the whole healthcare network. A suitable architecture for such an information system must take into account that it has to work as an integral part of a complex socio-technical system with changing conditions and requirements. We have surveyed the core requirements of healthcare professionals and analysed the literature for known problems and information needs. We consolidated the results to define use cases for an integrated information system as communication patterns, from which general implications on the required properties of a helathcare network information system could be derived. Key issues are flexibility, adaptability, robustness, integration of existing systems and standards, semantic compatibility, security and process orientation. Based on these results an IT architecture is being designed that is capable of addressing the requirements mostly on the basis of well-established standards and concepts.

Informationsintegration in Gesundheitsversorgungsnetzen

Informationssysteme sind im Gesundheitswesen von hoher Bedeutung, und aktuelle gesundheitspolitische Entwicklungen forcieren ihren Ausbau.

Data logistics as a means of integration in healthcare applications

Information integration is still a crucial issue in healthcare applications. Most clinical applications are determined by a huge variety of heterogeneous and independent work places, most of them equipped with specialized clinical hardware. Due to this it is almost impossible -- at least not feasible -- to run a common database system storing all relevant data of a clinical application. Nevertheless these clinical applications have to share their data. Our solution to this integration problem is to facilitate so called Process based Data Logistics. This approach is based on the integration capabilities of process management; however it does not coordinate the staff working in the healthcare domain in a restricting sense, but coordinates data sources and data sinks of these applications.

Web-Content- Managementsysteme

Sich im Internet zu repräsentieren, ist inzwischen für ein Unternehmen obligatorisch geworden. Dabei wird oftmals unterschätzt, dass die gezeigten Inhalte und Strukturen gepflegt werden müssen.

Process Based Data Logistics: a Solution for Clinical Integration Problems

Integration is a big issue in healthcare environments. One aspect of integration is data logistics that supplies physicians with relevant patient data along treatment processes. The two main tasks facilitated by data logistics are data transportation and data transformation. To enable data transport, workflow management concepts are adopted for indirect process support to supply data. To enable data transformation, formats, ontologies and terminologies are considered in an XML based transformation approach. A case study regarding self tonometry illustrates this approach.

Building a generic platform for medical screening applications based on domain specific modeling and process orientation

The German health care system increasingly encounters an enormous cost pressure. Preventive medicine opens the possibility to avoid cost for the treatment of chronically sick persons and, especially, for the highly expensive hospitalization. Since with screenings, a special discipline of preventive medicine, a large number of persons are to be examined, information technology plays an important role to reduce cost and to increase treatment quality. We introduce a generic process based platform for distributed screenings for the early detection and diagnosis of the glaucoma disease. Thereby, glaucoma is merely one disease pattern which can be covered with the generic process based platform. Methods and concepts for the enactment of different screening processes and the integration of various modalities are in the center of our interest.

Web Services and Web Applications

In this chapter the emerging Web service technology is discussed and the ways it complements traditional Web applications are explored. The chapter is organized as follows. In the next section Web services are motivated; the relationship between Web services and Web applications is explored; some definitions of Web services are discussed; and the components of the service-oriented architecture (SOA) are defined.

Developing WAA and WPA

While Chap. 2 has introduced the architectural framework for the development of Web applications, this chapter will demonstrate how to develop a concrete Web application within this framework. So to say, Chap. 2 has defined the skeleton for such a development, i.e. the WAA and WPA were generally introduced. This chapter is going to fill this framework with concrete components (WAA) and layers (WPA). Last but not least, the architectures defined in this chapter must be associated with technologies; this happens in Chap. 4.

Basic Programming Concepts for Web Applications

This part of the book introduces programming concepts for Web applications. We distinguish two different sorts of approaches, basic ones and more complex ones. In this chapter, we will talk about the basic concepts, whereas Chap. 6 will be dedicated to higher level approaches. The big advantage of the solutions presented in this chapter is the ease of cost at which they come. They do not require extensive environments or special infrastructures, but can be realized comparably simply. On the other hand, they only offer basic means for application programming. They cannot compete with high-level approaches when it comes to complex services like transaction management or sophisticated access control mechanisms. Irrespective of their simplicity, some of them can be considered to be as powerful as conventional programming languages. Thus, even complex scenarios might be realized using these simple approaches, avoiding the complex overhead required for higher level technologies.

Classification of Internet Standards and Technologies

Technologies are the third dimension in the Web application framework architecture introduced in Sect. 2.2. The need to consider technologies throughout the process of Web application design is motivated in Sect. 2.2.3. The architecture developed as a result of the stepwise approach described in the previous chapter is not tied to any concrete technology and is free of the specifics of any module of the framework architecture. Now we have to connect the neutral architectures for the Web application and the platform to concrete technologies in order to determine how to implement them.