Interoperability of hospital information systems: a case study

Like many other enterprises, hospitals and healthcare organizations are now adopting networked information systems that incorporate heterogeneous hardware, software, and other elements (e.g., conceptual models). It is important to integrate these information systems developed independently by diverse set of people. Since healthcare involves very high level of diversity of knowledge, the interoperability of healthcare information systems poses some difficult problems. The task is challenging given the semantic differences of messages used by different types of healthcare professionals (e.g., physicians and nurses). We analyze the problem of interoperability with reference to different solutions, and present our experience in the development of a solution for the interoperability of clinical information systems based on HL7, CORBA and Java for a modern hospital in Australia.