TITLE:
Using a Health Level 7 Interoperability Bus to Support Legacy Systems in the Health Domain
AUTHORS:
Rafael Andrade, Aldo von Wangenheim, Alexandre Savaris, Karine Petry
KEYWORDS:
Middleware; Healthcare; Interoperability Bus; Legacy System; HL7; Telemedicine
JOURNAL NAME:
E-Health Telecommunication Systems and Networks,
Vol.2 No.4,
December
27,
2013
ABSTRACT: In order to reduce the effort in the integration and
actualization of heterogeneous healthcare legacy systems that should share a
common database, we propose the creation of an interoperability
bus using the HL7 standard—the HL7Middleware. This interoperability bus is an
intermediate layer responsible for the communication between a database, health
information systems and medical equipment, called HL7Server. Connected systems
use the HL7 messaging semantics to store and retrieve data from the database.
We validate our approach with respect to two different criteria: performance and
integration costs. Benchmark tests were executed with and without the use of HL7Middleware
and with different network bandwidths. These results demonstrated that the
performance of the interoperability bus is higher when compared to traditional
database access for larger volumes of data and when the bandwidth of the user
is considerably lower than the bandwidth of the
connection between HL7Server and database. The overall development and deployment cost was considered low and the reusability degree of
wrapper code was considered high, thus suggesting a progressive reduction of
the integration costs of additional services and subsystems of an organization.