A Multi-node Mechanism to Verify Interoperability of Health Care Software Applications

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Ronchieri, E. | Venturi, V.

Affiliations: INFN CNAF, Viale Berti Pichat 6/2, Bologna, Italy | INFN CNAF, Via Ranzani 13/2, Bologna, Italy

Note: [] Corresponding author. Email: elisabetta.ronchieri@cnaf.infn.it. Tel: (+39)0516092760

Abstract: Health care software applications deal with several standards that allow institutes to transmit clinical data and images from patients' electronic folders to different hospital sites for diagnosis, medical studies and treatment. Interoperability of these applications is crucial to exchange data and use information over the time, but what actions are required to achieve it in practice are not completely clear. In this paper, we describe a multi-node mechanism that is able to configure an operational scenario of presumable interoperable services, to automatically deploy, install and execute a given scenario and to make adjustments over time as new versions of existing components become available. We show how this mechanism can address interoperability for a specific health care environment, to communicate measures or criteria on the interoperability status amongst services in the domain by generating ad-hoc reports. We detail how a system called ETICS can be extended to support the proposed mechanism in order to run tests for DCMTK and dgate-server amongst different combinations of computers. This provides us with a system to verify interoperability of software applications that belong to different domains.

Keywords: interoperability, standards, health care software applications

DOI: 10.3233/jid-2012-0008

Journal: Journal of Integrated Design & Process Science, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 27-42, 2012