Developing a hospital information system ecosystem for creating new clinical collaboration methodologies

One of the biggest challenges when developing new components or workflows for Hospital Information Systems (HIS) is the lack of a freely available stable core system with integration capabilities for various clinical and administrative subsystems. We created a prototype of an OpenEHR based HIS which can be used as a core system for the development of new clinical applications and for prototyping research ideas. We created an integration framework with standard open source components based on JBoss ESB and JBoss Drools. The implementation also includes an exemplary integration of an open source ERP (Openbravo) and open source PACS (DCM4CHEE) and shows that the proposed architecture results in an highly maintainable core architecture.