An Investigation on System Interoperability in Healthcare Information Systems Based on the Web Services.

Healthcare Information System (HIS) is the use of networking and information technologies to computerise the processing and exchanging of medical information. HISs have brought great benefits to healthcare institutions, and the accuracy and performance of information processing have been significantly improved. However, the integration of existing HISs has raised some issues, such as data transmission, network limitation, data security, and poor system interoperability. The issue of system interoperability is becoming more critical as there are a considerable number of hospitals using different HIS systems. The aim of this study is to address this issue. A new distributed middleware technology ‘Web Service’ is becoming promising for addressing the interoperability issue. In spite of the successful application in e-business, this new technology has not been formally applied to HISs. The main objective of this study is to address the interoperability issue using the web service technology. In order to demonstrate and assess the proposed solution in the PhD project, a small scale but real Web Service-based Integrated Healthcare Information System (WSIHIS) designed for the Osseointegration project at Queen Mary’s hospital in Roehampton, London was developed. For the implementation of WSIHIS, the necessary knowledge and technologies were studied. Then the actual system was designed using flowcharts and Object-oriented system development methodology. With the WSIHIS developed, a system assessment was carried out using different operating system platforms, programming languages and database systems. The outcome of the assessment showed that Web Services enabled WSIHIS to work across multiple platforms; make use of functions and applications developed by different programming languages, and exchange the data across database systems. A conclusion drawn from this study is that the Web Service based solution could help existing and future HISs to reduce the effort in overcoming the interoperability problem between HISs in future. At the end of this thesis, the author notes that the proposed solution requires some further work, such as an improvement in data order of the datasets produced by Web Services and the optimisation on the performance of Web Services. In addition, in the real world the requirements of HISs are increasing. Therefore, a core element of future work will be addressing these demands by optimising the performance of Web Services, and further assessing and enhancing the WSIHIS functionality, usability and robustness