Integrated health care services, part 1th

Apply Enterprise service bus to health care

This two-part article will demonstrate that a variety of health care-related services are aggregated through a service bus, which I call (perhaps not accurate) Healthcare service buses (HSB). In the 1th part, I'll introduce a use case scenario where the various applications that serve the patient need to be connected to HSB, and I'll explain the features that HSB should provide. Next, I'll introduce the Java Business integration (JBI) architecture, which is used to build HSB. To understand the events that occur inside the JBI server in the following order, you will learn how JBI is used internally for business integration and how its components work with external applications. The final chapter of part 1th provides a configuration instance that demonstrates how to control the JBI component behavior for health care purposes. In part 2nd, you will learn how to use the existing capabilities of the open source JBI implementation (Apache ServiceMix) and integrate health care services by implementing new ServiceMix capabilities.

Health care Service Bus

HSB integrates a large number of health-care-related services. Imagine the need for a life-saving emergency patient, including blood transfusions, emergency prescriptions and radiological tests.

When a patient arrives at a medical facility, the attending doctor uses the service bus to view the history of allergies through the application running on the patient's phone. The doctor can also enter the patient's initial observations into a medical prescription application connected to the bus. The doctor's observation is routed through the service bus to the Web server hosting the patient's insurance portal.

Doctors then prescribe blood transfusions in the same prescription application. The prescription is then automatically routed through the service bus not only to the blood bank, but also to the donor organization's application, which sends a text message to those donors whose blood samples have been successfully matched with the patient. The requirements for the donation organization application are also routed through the service bus.

Doctors also prescribe emergency medications and radiological tests, which are also entered into the same prescription application. The prescription application sends prescriptions through the bus to the pharmacy and radiology department within the medical establishment.

Service Aggregation

You can see that in this use case, HSB allows a variety of applications to interconnect, interoperate, and aggregate services. The two main types of applications-service consumers and service providers-are connected to HSB. A prescription application that sends blood transfusion requirements to the HSB as the consumer of the service (the application that requests or uses the service). A donation organization application that sends text messages to potential blood donors as a service provider (the application that provides the requested service). Interconnection and interoperability are different requirements that collectively provide service aggregation. Interconnection means that the service provider and the service consumer have a common way to connect (reach) each other so that they can manipulate each other (interaction information and messages). HSB uses a common XML format to exchange messages with each other.

HSB as an SOA

The architecture that relies heavily on "services" like HSB is called Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). SOA means that everything is served. Sending SMS to a donation organization application is a service. Radiology is also a service that carries out radiological inspections as needed. In SOA, any application that exposes a service is a service provider, and an application that requests, requests, or uses a service is a service consumer.

Figure 1 shows the service provider and the service consumer connected to the HSB:

Figure 1. Service providers and service consumers connect to HSB

Please note that Figure 1 shows three service providers connected to the Hsb:insurance company Portal, donor Group, and radiology Department applications. HSB should be able to connect service consumers to internal and external service providers so that they can interoperate with each other. In Figure 1, the radiology Department application is within the medical establishment, and the donor Group and Insurance company Portal application are outside the medical facility.