Generic Service Patterns and Navigational Access Structures for Web-Enabled Public Healthcare

Public healthcare systems are complex with diverse components that utilize different technologies, therefore Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is suggested as a data bridge between the heterogeneous parts. This paper investigates an Egyptian public healthcare case study where SOA is used for integrating hospitals with each other and with other healthcare actors through a governmental Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). Interactions between public hospitals through a governmental portal are known as Government-to-Government (G2G) services. The research will focus on architectural and navigational design aspects of the ESB. The service patterns are the contribution of this paper and they represent generic healthcare activities invoked by five major actors; the government as facilitator, the producers to cover the doctors and nurses, the healthcare providers represented in hospitals and clinics, the health intermediaries to include health insurance companies and pharmacies and finally the patient. Re-usability, abstraction, loose coupling and scalability are the software metrics used to evaluate the architecture following the proposed patterns. It is also shown how system navigation has been improved with the use of patterns.