A Service-Oriented Architecture for Information Support to Virtual Hospital Structures

Background: Shared andintegrated care requires increased cooperation and integrated information exchange among disparate and dispersed healthcare organizations that may span the boundaries of health districts and even the boundaries of countries. Objectives: The objective of our study is to support the integrated information needs of healthcare organizations that are inter-connected in order to create virtual hospital structures. Methods: A service-oriented system architecture is proposed with the use of Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS), web services technology and the XML-based Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) in order to integrate patient information, to provide access to and to enable exchange of this integrated information among the healthcare organizations of a virtual hospital structure. Results: A prototype implementation of the proposed architecture is under development for two healthcare organizations and is expected to be experimentally tested in a Greek virtual hospital structure. Conclusions: After testing and evaluating system implementation it is intended to further extend system architecture in order to support the retrieval of anonymous patient records regarding patients certain medical problems.