Implementation Of Semantic Level Integration For Heterogeneous Medical Information System

Currently, the government investment is playing a more and more important role inChinese medical informationization construction. In the past years, the informationizationconstruction took place only inside the medical instutions, which is independent andinstution-controlled. But now, it turns to be a clinical service oriented and electronic medicalrecords centered application and is led by the government. This government-controlledconstruction is no longer institution's internal project but a regional or nationwide project.It's a huge challenge for digital medical information system integration, because thereare too many systems for different and specialized purposes and the amount is still increasing.And the lastest medical informationization construction requirements also challenge theintegration solution more than ever. To meet thess demand, the medical systems shouldprovide proper medical information for others to access; meanwhile there should be anintegration solution for effective cooperation in workflow. In this solution, a powerful andeffective integration system is very important and required in the practical applicationenvironment. And this integration system should support more on the semantic level whichcan make the workflow between integrated enterprises more flexible, dynamic andcooperative.But the reality of medical informationization integration is more complex than it wassupposed to be. The medical information systems were developed prior to when they wereintegrated. In the market, there are too many systems designed with their own implementation,even for the same purpose. Although nowadays, the web service technology is more and morepopular and easier to support the cooperation between systems. But it still needs specifiedintefaces provide services.According to the requirement of the practical environment of medical informationsystem integration, this paper addresses the architecture and the detailed technolodge ofintegration platform. This platform is designed to be a solution that fits most the integration requirement. It can intergrat systems to make them communicate and cooperate with eachother in a loosy and open manner while still retaining the systems' independence.This paper includes:1. Analysis of the practical application environment which is refered to make a clearrequirement, clarify the problems that will face and should be solved.2. Discription of the architecture of this integration system. Based on this platform,enterprise workflow integration can be easily achieved through configuration filesaccording their semantic meaning;3. A design of improved the common adapter regarding the web service interfacesare difficult to be unified in the integration. The implementation of the commonadapter allow different web services to use the integration platform to achieve thetranslation of the parameters of the interfaces, avoid re-coding and reduce the costof development and maintenance.This integration system is developed and launched in dozens of national and internationalmedical institutions. It integrates systems between SQL, DICOM, HL7and plain textformatted interfaces. It's effective and proved to be able to avoid the system to be re-codedand reduces the coupling of systems in the integration.