eHealth – Unified Healthcare Logical Space through Applied Interoperability

The current paper presents a patient-centric approach that implements a unified healthcare logical space model for medical information environment. We focused our work on interoperability features with extensive usage of standards in order to develop a distributed information framework: a pilot system called CardioNET. This eHealth system was designed to integrate medical services from various healthcare providers and improve the quality of services, through some of latest medical and IT&C technologies. Modern healthcare activities require a patient-centric vision, where patients must receive medical attention or treatment anytime, regardless of their physical location. CardioNET embodies this approach where hardware, software and medical activities become “services” of a “logical cardio-health care domain-space”. This distributed environment also offers tools for remote interactions between patients, doctors, medical entities (e.g. hospitals, labs) and authorities. Based on international domain standards (IDC10, LOINC, HL7), the system creates an infrastructure for interoperability and data exchange using widely accepted formats (HL7 messages, or XML records). High level protocols (UDDI, SOAP/HL7 and HTTP) provide the presented framework the means to exchange of HL7 or XML compliant messages between the systems’ main healthcare actors. CardioNet subsystems have specialized metadata registries and shared data repositories, which altogether create a distributed healthcare pilot environment for medical decisions support, research and educational activities.