PPEPR for enterprise healthcare integration

Abstract

PPEPR is software to connect healthcare enterprises. Healthcare is a complex domain and any integration system that connects healthcare enterprise applications must facilitate heterogeneous healthcare systems at all levels - data, services, processes, healthcare vendors, standards, legacy systems, and new information systems, all of which must interoperate to provide healthcare services. The lack of interoperability within healthcare standards (e.g. HL7) adds complexity to the interoperability initiatives. HL7's user base has been growing since the early 2000s. There are many interoperability issues between the widely adopted HL7 v2 and its successor, HL7 v3, in terms of consistency, data/message modeling, precision, and useability. We have proposed an integration platform called PPEPR: (Plug and Play Electronic Patient Records) which is based on a semantic Service-oriented Architecture (sSOA). PPEPR connects HL7 (v2 & v3) compliant healthcare enterprises. Our main goal is to provide seamless integration between healthcare enterprises without imposing any constraint on existing or proposed EPRs. © ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2009.