Data Providing Web Service-Based Integration Framework for use in a Health Care Context

Removing boundaries between health care sub-domains has recently received increasing attention in both research and practice. Termed "silos", traditional divisions in medicine are increasingly viewed as inefficient at a time when efficiency is essential. With a practical scenario as our basis, we review the use of a Data Providing Web Service (DPWS)-based framework to integrate data from multiple medical operations. A DPWS-based framework also addresses key software engineering requirements of our practical health care scenario such as the creation of a separation of concerns between the data source and the integration framework as well as the use of a domain ontology for describing the data that are accessible from the DPWSs. A separation of concerns gives full autonomy to each medical operation with regards to what information is exposed and with what controls (i.e. privacy and auditing). The domain ontology provides a common representation of data for all actors interacting with the framework which enhances the ability of the framework to handle distributed sources in addition to creating a consistent interface to continually evolving data sources.