A Collaborative Healthcare Service Framework and Performance Evaluation

Abstract

While collaboration is becoming increasingly critical in many industries to maximize revenue and minimize cost by taking advantage of other’s expertise, healthcare industry has hardly utilized the advantages of collaboration. This paper proposes a framework for collaborative healthcare services. The proposed framework is based on Service Oriented Architecture using web services and utilizes a medical coding system, Current Procedure Terminology (CPT), for interoperability. The framework is designed to facilitate collaborations among healthcare service providers, and is expected to reduce medical expenditure of patients and increase revenue of healthcare service providers. In order to verify the performance of the proposed framework, a simulation study is conducted. The experimental results show that the framework contributes to utilization increase and treatment lead time decrease in healthcare services.