HL7 V3 Laboratory Messaging using SOA Infrastructure

Abstract

The need of interoperability in healthcare information systems has given rise to the development of various healthcare standards. However, most of these standards focus on the interoperability requirements of a particular health- care department.Health Level 7 (HL7) is a singular standard as it focuses on the interface requirements of the entire health organization, thus facil- itating interoperability and integration across multiple organizations with heterogeneous interfaces. HL7 V3 communication infrastructure aka Mes- saging Infrastructure (MI) enables interoperable communication using well- de ned interactions, but is unable to; provide exible communication across heterogeneous healthcare environments, capture rapidly changing healthcare business needs and maintain business sessions. In this research work, we aim to provide a exible approach for integrating healthcare information systems using Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). To cope with the de ciencies of HL7 V3 existing MI, we have proposed ar- chitecture and a methodology to perform the challenging task of integrating SOA to HL7 V3 models (without changing the legacy infrastructure). The architecture is realized for HL7 V3 laboratory domain and patient admin- istration domain, by creating the composition of HL7 V3 standard services viz. Entity Identi cation Service (EIS), Result Query Service (RQS) and Or- der Placer/Ful ller Service (OPFS). The services are deployed on multiple point-of-cares, and can be invoked locally as well as externally. This research work highlights the weaknesses of HL7 V3 MI and key strengths of our proposed system. The proposed framework has been tested for EIS, RQS and OPF services on the span of two remotely residing point-of- cares and the results showed that the work ows generated by these services show 65 - 70% conformance with real healthcare business scenarios. The web service technologies such as SOAP, WSDL and XML along with SOA Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) provide enhanced interoperability in terms of data and platform, and increased communication (in and out data ow). The proposed methodology is also extendable to other healthcare care domains.