Achieving eHealth interoperability Via peer-to-peer communication Using JXTA Technology

Abstract: eHealth is an emerging area that boosts up with advancement in Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Due to variety of eHealth solutions developed by different IT firms with no proper shared standards, interoperability issue is then raised. Blekinge County healthcare organizations use two different systems MAGNA CURA and SYStem Cross. The two systems work well in their own scope. But these systems often need to communicate and coordinate for exchange of patients’ information which leads to the problem of interoperability. The aim of this research study is to provide fast and reliable peer-to-peer solution for exchange of patient information so as to achieve interoperability among healthcare organizations. This proposed solution is tested as a middleware between MAGNA CURA and SYStem Cross currently used by Blekinge County healthcare organizations. A qualitative approach including in-depth literature review and a semi-structured face-to-face interview has been used for understanding the context of research problem. We have tested our approach through an executable prototype. The prototype is implemented using JXTA platform. We have learned that Blekinge healthcare is decentralized and heterogonous in nature. For such kind of environment, peer-to-peer communication approach is suggested. According to the test result, the suggested syntactic level interoperability between the two mentioned systems has been achieved.