CORBAMed and DHE: Middleware Service Approach in Healthcare Information Systems

Abstract

The healthcare organizational structure is often naturally distributed. In order to improve the quality of care, the adoption of standards to allow the effective and robust networking of the various centers for clinical, epidemiological, administrative information management purposes has been widely recognized as an urgent and strategic need in the healthcare community. This chapter analyzes the status and challenges that today’s healthcare information systems have, and introduces two middleware service frameworks for information systems, namely CORBAMed and DHE, in detail. The middleware service can address heterogeneous problems and significantly assist interoperability and integrity of information systems by providing common services and a set of standard interfaces that enable different applications to interact with each other.