Hybrid Approach for Health Information Integration

Having a consistent and unified view of heterogeneous distributed medical information sources is an inevitable need of health informatics. Integrating medical information of patients or about a disease, a treatment or side effects of a drug, etc, is very useful to help medical education, to achieve medical research goals and to provide the computer-based decision support systems. Data integration is one of the main responses of the computer community to satisfy these new needs and several technologies have been developed for this purpose in the research domain as well as in practice that generally propose a fully materialized or fully virtual method. We present, IXIA, a semi-materialized data integration framework, which represents a new aspect of a hybrid method. Our framework is developed based on an object-oriented indexing model and a flexible data refreshing method.