Enabling virtual emergency healthcare enterprises using Web services.

Emergency healthcare delivery involves a variety of activities performed from the time of a call to the ambulance service till the time of patient's disposal from the emergency department of a hospital. As these activities are performed in at least two organizations (i.e. ambulance service and hospital) and they are interrelated to form inter-organizational healthcare processes, collaboration and coordination become a vital issue for patients and for emergency healthcare service performance. Web-based workflow systems in conjunction with web services present a new way for service-oriented integration (SOI) of disparate systems and for developing distributed applications within and between organizations. Thus, through process automation and the use of web services ambulance service and hospital emergency departments can automate their operations by making information available where and when needed and by providing an infrastructure for the integration of pre-hospital and in-hospital emergency healthcare. A prototype implementation of this approach is presented in this paper.