Higher level of interoperabtility through an architectural paradigm shift: A study of shared medication record

One of the most significant obstacles for ensuring a dynamic information flow in eHealth is utilization of diverse systems, because this impedes exchange by being proprietary. There has been a long tradition for implementation of standalone systems in eHealth i.e. it-silos. In parallel to implementation of it-silos, electronic message-based EDIFACTS have for nearly two decades been created to underpin part of the communication between sectors in the Danish eHealth. The objective in this paper is to analyze if an architectural paradigm shift to Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) for distributed eHealth systems can induce a higher level of interoperability as defined by [1], which leads to improved information sharing. This is done by considering the present Danish national architecture and infrastructure in comparison to the national to-be reference architecture. It can be concluded that the envisioned eHealth interoperability is possible to obtain through a new organization of data storage and through deployment of SOA based web-services, i.e. through an architectural paradigm shift.