Towards enterprise application integration principles for facility management software in hospitals

Currently, hospitals have often installed up to 100 software applications within the non-medical support services (FM). The applications are mostly uncoordinated and only accessible for employees of certain sub-areas. Therefore, data is often stored redundantly, has to be transferred manually and some stakeholders are unaware of data locations and/or cannot access the data. In order to become more efficient, to save resources and to increase (data) quality, hospitals are now forced to find solutions in their processes and IT architecture - in the area of FM as well. Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is an approach which has been applied to overcome this problem in other industries and partially also in the medical context in hospitals, but so far not including FM. During the latest research in non-medical support services in hospitals, connections and information needs between the different FM disciplines in hospitals became clearer. Extending these findings with the EAI principles in an explorative approach, the basis for future systematic integration of FM applications in hospitals is presented in this paper