Integration of medical equipment into SOA — Enabling technology for efficient workflow management

Within each hospital, medical equipment of diverse manufacturers is used. Due to strong competition, a large variety in self diagnosis functions and communication interfaces for technical equipment data have to be noticed. There is no common service interface available. This situation limits the capabilities of in-house maintenance personnel as well as the efficiency of external service providers. This paper shortly presents a concept of a manufacture independent architecture for medical equipment service management and a more detailed introduction to an approach for the integration of non-Web Service (legacy) enabled devices and sources of service related information.