Sharing personal health information via service-oriented computing: a case of long-term care.

Sharing personal health information among healthcare providers is a crucial business process not only for saving limited healthcare resources but also for increasing patient's healthcare quality. Building an effective personal health information sharing process from established healthcare systems is a challenge in terms of coordination different business operations among healthcare providers and restructuring technical details existed in different healthcare information systems. This study responds this challenge with a service-oriented approach and develops a business software application to describe how the challenge can be alleviated from both managerial and technical perspectives. The software application in this study depicts personal health information sharing process among different providers in a long-term care setting. The information sharing scenario is based on an industrial initiative, such as Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) from healthcare domain and the technologies for implementing the scenario are Web Service technologies from Service-oriented computing paradigm. The implementation in this study can inform healthcare researchers and practitioners applying technologies from service-oriented computing to design and develop healthcare collaborative systems to meet the increasing need for personal health information sharing.