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FYP Final Report v1.0.0
Copyright and All Rights Reserved To: Pee-Lo Team @2003/04
68
Hospital X knows patient is allergic to medicine a and Hospital X does not share this information with
Hospital Y, then Hospital Y will still prescribe medicine a to the patient and this makes the sick sicker.
As we journeyed into globalization such a simple situation is no mere a bad dream but rather a Pandora’s
box being opened by some invisible pair hands. Many health care institutions have move into information
technology era. XML web services will be the next step in advancing forward towards the maturity of this
era. It enables all health care institutions to share their patients’ health records with other such institutions.
Restrictions can be imposed based on general agreements of the participating health care institutions.
Sharing of information enriches the services provided by the participating health care institutions.
II.
Design
Architecture
XML web services, like any other Intranet/Internet applications, have the ability of interconnecting one
system with another with ease and that is one of the focuses of this paper: to enable information sharing. In
XML web services, information are warped in XML tags before it is being transmitted to the requesting
clients or servers as shown in Fig. 1. Any requests for information will be transmitted through the
Intranet/Internet in XML with no regard on the type of transmission medium used.
Health Care Center X can request information from Health Care Center Y through a XML web service
request over the Intranet/Internet with disregard of any transmission medium used. Web server(s) of
Health Care Center Y will receive this request in XML form, processed it and later generate a respond back
to the enquirer using the same technique. Web server(s) in Health Care Center X will consume this XML
web service respond, processed it and produce an output for the system at Health Care Center X to use.
The connectivity also expands to cover the metropolitan area network (MAN) of a corporation. Though at
this current moment when this paper is written, many companies around the world has resort to the usage of
remote procedural call (RPC) to establish a connection between two sites. XML web services have all the
capability of performing the tasks that RPC can do and that leads to the question of, “Is it worth the
upgrade or change?” RPC is software and hardware dependent [16]. A Java RPC will have different
architecture with that of the Microsoft’s Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM). For both of these
two technologies to work together is a hard (though not really impossible) job for the software developers.
Imagine the complication, which will arise when a company has just acquired a new branch, which has a
totally different backend system using a different RPC. XML web services solve these inconsistencies by
standardizing everything to just using XML as well as HTTP and TCP/IP as its default carriers.
By referring back to Fig. 1, Health Care Center Y can request information stored at its branch (which is
Branch A) through a XML web service request through the Intranet/Internet and the same request/respond
process as that of the communication between Health Care Center X and Health Care Center Y will take
place. The data storage can still be independent and not a single backend system needs to be changed.
Device and Location Independent
Implementation of XML web services has other benefits as well. It expands the coverage of telemedicine.
Off site physicians or mobile clinics can connect with the headquarters (or even the nearest branch) using
any transmission medium and, best of all, any devices. The reason behind this is that XML web services
are hardware and software independent. A physician can request a specific patient’s medical health record
from its nearest branch of a health care institution and the logic of searching in the institution’s system will
does all the work for him and produced his desired result. The richness of this feature gives the physicians
the freedom of movement and financial and ‘shopping’ freedom to the health care institutions in acquiring
electronic devices needed by its staffs.
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