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FYP Final Report v1.0.0
Copyright and All Rights Reserved To: Pee-Lo Team @2003/04
66
Appendix A
Appendix A is the technical paper which we wrote to participate in an international conference in
Jordan.
XML Web Services In Telemedicine – A Step Closer To Globalization
of Health Informatics (HI)
Abstract
Each health care institution (hospitals, polyclinics and clinics) has their own standard of representing data
and logics and algorithms on how they get the analysis and medical records prepared and done. To sum up,
there exist no one standard to guide health care institutions on how to do such procedures probably due to a
few reasons; namely on the financial and technical costs to standardize the whole process and an overall
agreement to a standard. To overcome this drawback, a cost effective and technically adaptable technology
has to be used. This paper is not on how to recreate a new system to fix the problem but rather on how to
add another layer or module of technology to the existing design of a system that makes it geographically
independent, device independent and accessible anywhere anytime at the lowest financial cost. It is not
about creating a new standard but rather on make use of a standard to polish up the ‘rusty’ part of a system.
It is on the usage of XML web services in the field of telemedicine to expand its coverage and service at a
financially cost effective and commercially viable state.
Introduction
Telemedicine brings the meaning of the utilization of information and telecommunication technology (ICT)
to assist in medical diagnosis, treatments and patient care [1]. Over the years ICT has blossomed into a
very promising technology. The Internet is making the world smaller and computers simplify our lifestyle.
In the United States alone, in the year 2002, more than 100 million Americans have searched online for
information which includes health information; of which that is about 13 million increment compared to the
previous year [2]. This proves the Internet is one of the best tool used by the general public to search for
information regardless of any specific fields of interest.
Although Telemedicine technology has been around for a while now, its expansion is significantly slow
due to the cost and limitation of the technology [3]. Today, these limitations can be overcome with the use
of XML Web Services.
Web Services is a distributed computing technology enabling the exposure and reuse of logical business
entities over the Internet [4]. It is an emphasis on open standards, based upon World Wide Web
Consortium (W3C) protocols and communications standards.
With open standards, business can deploy components on the Web to be consumed by anyone, anywhere.
It does not matter what computer is being used, its operating system, or the programming language used to
implement the logic. Applicable bits include the communications protocol, data formats, and registry
interaction, which are defined by open W3C standards. Because it is base on XML it is sometimes called
as XML Web Services [4].
One of the primary advantages of the XML Web services architecture is that it allows programs written in
different languages on different platforms to communicate with each other in a standards-based way [5].
The other significant advantage that XML Web services will be that it conforms to standard Web protocols
namely XML, HTTP and TCP/IP.
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