An architecture for health information exchange in pervasive healthcare environment

Abstract

This paper presents an architecture for health information exchange in pervasive healthcare environments meant to be generally applicable to different applications in the healthcare domain. Our architecture has been designed for message exchange by integrating ubiquitous computing technologies, intelligent agents and healthcare standards, in order to provide interoperability between healthcare systems. We conduct controlled experiments at three cardiology clinics, an analysis laboratory, and the cardiology sector of a hospital located in Marília (São Paulo, Brazil). Three scenarios were developed to evaluate this architecture, and the results showed that the architecture is suitable to facilitate the development of healthcare systems by offering generic and powerful message exchange capabilities. The proposed architecture facilitates health information exchange between various healthcare information systems, contributing in this way to the development of a pervasive healthcare environment that allows healthcare to be available anywhere, anytime and to anyone.