Modeling and implementing medical Web services

On the one hand, Web services are increasingly gaining attention. Standardization efforts have improved their stability and range of applications. Composition and coordination techniques for Web services enable an application integration effort beyond loosely coupled systems. On the other hand, medical Web services are covered by the DICOM and HL7 communication protocols and are profiled by the IHE (Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise) technical framework. Standardization is more extensive, most workflows are well defined, and integration is tighter than in most other domains. Nevertheless, so far standardization focused on conventional workflow systems. In an Internet-based medical environment with high security standards, communication is strongly restricted and conventional systems fail to deliver. This paper proposes a modeling process for medical Web services. The IHE patient administration process flow serves as a well defined example. Furthermore, the paper defines requirements of a Web service based middleware for the execution of medical Web services by investigating currently relevant Web service protocols. The technique should enable building medical applications for Internet-based workflow execution. Finally, Biztalk 2004 is used to evaluate the implementation of the analyzed sample functionality.