A scalable and self-adapting notification framework for healthcare information systems

There has been a great interest in publish/subscribe systems in recent years. This interest, coupled with the pervasiveness of light-weight electronic devices, such as cellular phones and personal digital assistants, has opened a new arena in publish/subscribe networks. Currently, many broker overlay networks are static and rarely change in structure. Often, a network overlay structure is predefined or manually modified. This paper presents a dynamic broker network for disseminating critical lab and patient information in a Healthcare information system. The reported work builds upon previous network optimization research on ad hoc publish/subscribe networks. The underlying framework utilizes user-defined cost functions to satisfy quality of service constraints. In essence, the broker network optimization problem is reduced to an incremental search problem to generate low cost network configurations. Certain reliability issues are also addressed by providing a scheduling algorithm to selectively retransmit information and handle broker connectivity failures.