Using SOA with Web Services for effective Integration of Hospital Information Systems via an Enterprise Service Bus
This work addresses the need for hospitals and health professionals to share data for research and health delivery, but it is incremental as it applies existing integration methods to a specific domain.
The research tackled the problem of integrating hospital information systems across geographical areas by using a centralized enterprise service bus with Service Oriented Architecture and web services, resulting in enhanced interoperability and communication without requiring system-wide modifications.
Hospitals are distributed across geographical areas and it is important for all hospitals to share information as well as integrate their systems for effective researching and health delivery. Health personals and institutions in need of information from hospitals with respect to geographical areas can easily do researches on patients, treatments, disease outbreaks, and effects of drugs. This research work is aimed at integrating of database systems of hospital across geographical areas via a service bus. A centralized service bus was used to facilitate interoperability of applications across platforms and enhance communication within the hospital infrastructure as well as creating enabling environment for new layer of abstractions to be added without modification of the entire system. Concept of Service Oriented Architecture with web services was used for rapid integration solution in solving the challenges faced during integration of multiple incompatible applications.