Business process integration for distributed applications in radiology

Distributed object technologies offer access to data and services virtually everywhere in a distributed application system and introduce a high degree of freedom in application design. In order to retain flexibility even during business process re-engineering, the explicit modelling of business process aspects separately from the application system components is desired. The most prominent technology to serve this purpose is workflow management, which is a groupware technology and mainly focuses on the collaboration of people. Recently developer of distributed object platforms start to provide services that initially aimed at managing distributed transactions but also allow for the modelling and enactment of communication sequences between distributed objects. We have applied the workflow management approach practically within a heterogeneous laboratory environment integrating typical radiology application systems. Here, we compare our experiences with what can be expected from such a distributed object platform taking Microsoft´s BizTalk as example