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information about a provider or organization to e.g.
enhance document meta-data located in the XDS
Registry with the “confidentiality codes” to ensure
legal data access to authorized providers. On the
other hand it can be used as yellow pages providing
unique and consistent information about all
participating healthcare providers.
Providing, updating and querying information
should be only possible for authorized users and
systems via a graphical user interface as well as via
a HL7 v2 message-based or file-based web service
interfaces. The access will be secure, auditable and
controlled. For that reason other components of the
HIEN will be used following the IHE IT -
Infrastructure whitepaper “Access control”
(Caumanns et. al., 2009).
3 METHODS
The PORS will be developed as Open Source
Software (OSS) hosted on the gforge platform
1
as a
project of the Open eHealth Foundation under the
Apache Software Licence 2. Until the first stable
release it will be a closed project.
The technical implementation is based on Java
and Groovy. In addition to the Open eHealth
Integration Platform (IPF) the ICW eHealth
Framework (eHF) is used. IPF is an enterprise
service bus with a Groovy-based domain specific
language (DSL) which enables easy HL7 message
parsing pre-processing and routing. The eHF focuses
on modularization and supports model driven
software development. Because the framework
provides modules for standard functionalities like
security and authorization it is possible to spend
most of the development time on the functional
aspects. Supported standard-based messages are the
functionalities add, update and disable of the master
file notification HL7 v2 MFN M02. The graphical
user interface (GUI) for manual administration is
based on Java Server Faces (JSF). Data storage for
testing is realized via HSQL data base.
4 RESULTS
The PORS is designed to fit into a service oriented
IHE compliant HIEN architecture. As the PORS will
be published as open source software the service can
be used in any other HIEN.
1
http://gforge.openehealth.org/gf/project/pors/
The PORS can be linked to each health system
uniquely identifying all providers (hospitals,
physicians, nurses, pharmacists and dentists)
allowing all the information related to a healthcare
provider to be pulled from multiple sources into a
single holistic view.
The PORS itself consists of a multiple-tier-layer
architecture (see Fig.1). To add, update and disable
data sets in PORS automatically, flat files (XML,
CSV) as well as HL7 messages (HL7 v2 MFN M02)
can be received via a web service interface provided
by the IPF. IPF has two adapters, one for flat files
and one for HL7 messages, to receive data sets and
to route them to the application logic layer provided
by eHF. On this layer data will be extracted,
processed and converted into Java objects according
to the specific domain model (see Fig. 2). These
objects can be stored to the database. All changes
will be stored in a history. Additionally PORS can
be administrated through a web based GUI realized
with JSF.
A web service interface is foreseen to query the
PORS using the GUI or by HL7 query/response
conformance statements interfaces.
Figure 1: Architectural overview of PORS.
5 CONCLUSIONS
The PORS will assist healthcare providers in
communicating with each other by acting as a type
of electronic ‘yellow pages', making it easier for
them to coordinate care for patients. Without a
PORS a regional HIEN will not be realizable
because it is a central component necessary for all
other services to have a unique identifier. The fact
that it will be open sourced will make it easer for
other related projects to make a quick progress
because it is not necessary to reinvent the wheel.
Another issue is to enforce security and
authentication. Technically in this project it is not
vital to cope with it due to the use of eHF which
foresees to provide security to all eHF-based
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