Web Service Design Concepts and Structures for Support of Highly Interconnected E-Health Infrastructures: A Bottom-Up Approach

Abstract

In this chapter we present organizational aspects that appear when considering the case of interconnecting and integrating different compartments of a modern hospital. While the information and communication technologies provide advanced and powerful means for the creation of coherent information supply services, such as the Web service and ontology technologies, there is a lack of appropriate organizational metaphors that will enable the successful assimilation of these technologies, helping to aid in the improvement of critical cost parameters that concentrate a large part of the hospital’s management resources, while also helping to improve the knowledge capital and the intangible and immaterial assets of any particular hospital, which are considered as the most essential and scarce resource. In this paper we presents a technology-based approach for solving interoperability problems at the service level, and we deliberately adopt a problem-solving approach that has successfully been adopted by the European IST Project ARTEMIS.