Generic service patterns for web enabled public healthcare systems

Different technologies are used to build different projects in the same organization. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is the data bridge between incompatible technologies. It is considered the most important technology for integration. A service modeling technique based on the suggested healthcare service patterns has been applied on an Egyptian public healthcare case study where SOA is used for integrating the hospitals through an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). Interactions between different hospitals through a governmental portal are known as Government to Government (G2G) services that are similar to Business to Business (B2B) e-commerce transactions but it is on the governmental level. This paper will cover the analysis and design of public healthcare integration services and their orchestration over the governmental ESB portal. The service patterns are the contribution of this paper and they resemble healthcare activities invoked by five major actors; the government as facilitator, the producers to cover the doctors and nurses, the healthcare providers represented in hospitals and clinics, the health intermediaries to include health insurance companies and pharmacies and finally the patient. Re-usability, abstraction, loose coupling and scalability are the software metrics used in this study to ensure that the proposed patterns are generic to any kind of public healthcare application.