Project Scopes

Our project scopes will be focusing on how to address the four problem statements that we have identified. The project scopes are tailored to achieve a proof of concept of our solution. We are going to focus more on the wireless access implementation of our proposed solution. In other words, we are going to design a working prototype that functions on PDAs.

1) Dealing with Data Representation

To make data widely available and standardized, we propose the use of Extensible Markup Language (XML). XML is designed to improve the functionality of the Web by providing more flexible and adaptable information identification.

It is called extensible because it is not a fixed format like HTML (a single, predefined markup language). Instead, XML is actually a meta language — a language for describing other languages — which lets the developer design your own customized markup languages for limitless different types of documents. XML can do this because it's written in Standard Generalized Markup Language (ISO 8879:1985) or SGML; the international standard meta language for text markup systems (ISO 8879).

In our context, we can design a markup language using XML for unifying how health care data is being represented. Certain health care centers around America, Europe and Australasia have been using Health Level 7 (HL7) for intra-department communications. HL7 is a messaging protocol specifically developed to exchange health/medical/patient information between information systems. HL7 messaging is widely used with in Hospitals and Medical Organizations in the USA, Europe, and Australasia. HL7 is endorsed as a standard by the American National Standards Institutes (ANSI) [1].

HL7 is useful for intra-department communication; which means servers in one department communicate with another server at another department to obtain data, process it and show it on screen for the physicians. HL7 is good enough for intra-department communication but not for anything more than that.

We will design a standard XML schema to represent data to proof our concept of unified data representation is feasible.

2) Availability of Data

To make data available all the time, we need a technology or a method to broadcast it. Web services come to our mind.

Web services can be best explained as a unit of programming functionality that is exposed to client applications via the Internet. Web services are built on XML (literature review section will explain more).

With the data unified, we can broadcast the data out using web services and make it available to anyone who has the right to interact with the data. Web services can only be implemented once we have conceptualized our unified data representation section. One great thing about web services is that it is a standard and an open technology. No companies can claim it as their propriety technology.

As a proof of concept, based on the XML we have created before hand while doing the unification of data representation, we will build a web services and make the data publicly available to anyone who has the authority to interact with the data.

3) Accessibility of Data

With the achievement of unifying data representation and the implementation of web services, our next focus will be accessibility of data. Data needs to be accessed anywhere disregard of the devices used to do it.

This is where Microsoft .NET Framework comes in. We will use the .NET platform to develop applications for mobile devices (primarily PocketPC) and another version of it in web based format for mobile devices. The Web based format is targeted to those mobile devices which currently does not support the Microsoft .NET Framework.

Apart from that, we are also going to create a web based access to make accessing the data publicly available for those who does not have mobile devices.

4) Consistency of Data

This issue is attended to when we implement a standard way of data representation and web services. To prevent such inconsistency of data to happen, what the system has to do first is to use web services to obtain all the data about a patient first. Then only will the system begin updating the data.

Consistency of data is demonstrated once we implement standardization of data representation and web services.

Project Objectives

Our project objectives can be concisely summarized into these points:

1. To design a standard way of data representation in health care data transmission and sharing
   • We are going to represent all data in a standard XML form before transmission.
2. To make data publicly available for interaction with disregard to the current geographical location of the user
   • Using XML web services based on a standard XML will solve the problem. Applications can be written to consume web services and web services are transmitted via standard http which makes it available whenever anyone has access to the Internet.
3. To make the data accessible with disregard of what devices the user use in order to view or interact with the data
   • Microsoft .NET comes in and deals with this problem fairly simple. We program the logic once and design different applications which functions as facades to access the data.
4. To make updating data simple, managed and consistent
   • Standard data representation makes updating data simple and consistent.
5. To draft out an ideal health care solution that is efficient, complete and reliable.
   • We will come out with a solution to make health care available in all corners of the world with minimum or no downtime.