Efficient Processing of Metadata in Java SIG API for HL7

Abstract

Information technology has started focusing on the healthcare enterprises, for providing better medical care. There exist different healthcare enterprise standards that are used for the communication of medical information across health enterprises providing swift and reliable results. HL7 is one of those standards that are used for the exchange of medical information between healthcare systems. The new standard of HL7 named as version 3.0 (v3) is an emerging standard claims at achieving semantic interoperability with its well defined information models like Reference Information Model (RIM), Domain Message Information Model (D-MIM), and Refined Message Information Model (R-MIM). These models are converted to some technology specific format for implementation such as Model Interchange Format (MIF). This format includes metadata information in the form of XML. MIFs are required to be loaded in memory for generation and parsing of messages. Core API developed by Sun with approval of HL7 known as Java SIG API utilizes these files in a non-efficient manner. It loads all associations (no matter these are required or not) present in a particular MIF file. This creates not only the performance issue but also the memory wastage. In this work, an algorithm is proposed to improve the process of message generation and parsing by avoiding unnecessary associations during MIF loading. This technique is based on proxy design pattern. The proposed technique removes the performance bottleneck of the API and makes it space and time efficient.