HCX: A Distributed OSGi Based Web Interaction System for Sharing Health Records in the Cloud

WITH the maturity of Web Services and Enterprise Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), new delivery and Web interaction models are now demonstrating how services can be traded outside traditional ownership and provisioning boundaries. The value of SOA comes from having an architecture that readily accommodates change. The more your business changes, the more SOA pays for itself. However, the initial build-out of SOA, prior to business change or service sharing, is cost-ineffective. By incorporating cloud computing in SOA, the time to value is shortened because you leverage `other people´s work´ as well as saving on infrastructure cost by leveraging on demand cloud based infrastructure services. This article outlines a distributed Web interactive system for sharing health records on the cloud using distributed OSGi services and consumers, called HCX (Health Cloud eXchange). This system allows for different health record and related healthcare services to be dynamically discovered and interactively used by client programs running within a federated private cloud. A basic prototype is presented as proof of concept along with a description to the steps and processes involved in setting up the underlying infrastructure. Finally some future directions for using this infrastructure are illustrated.