Post-integration of a tumor documentation system into a HIS via middleware.

Integrating autonomous applications is a difficult task since they usually represent similar informations in different data schemes. Any communication requires an agreement of sender and receiver on a common data representation. The number of interfaces to convert one data representation into another is minimized if all participants of an information system agree on one data representation such as Health Level Seven (HL7) or Edifact. Even more convenient is the use of a middleware solution like the Distributed Healthcare Environment (DHE) that keeps message transfer completely transparent to the integration process. This paper discusses a project that aims at the integration of a cancer registry system into a DHE based Hospital Information System (HIS). The project is a cooperation between the universities of Giessen and Magdeburg within the framework of the European Communities Telematics Research Project HC 1019 HANSA (Healthcare Advanced Networked System Architecture). The concept of a so called 'DHE-Adapter' to integrate existing legacy systems is explained. This adapter converts a data or message format of a legacy system into calls of the DHE programming interface. To develop a DHE-Adapter for our cancer registry system we intend to design a DHE-Adapter-Generator which would be able to produce DHE-Adapters for different systems and export formats, e.g. HL7 or Edifact. That would allow a variety of software vendors to integrate their products into the DHE without entering deeply into the DHE's programming interface.