A sustainable software architecture for eHealth system-of-systems

Abstract

eHealth could combine a number of heterogeneous and independent systems, such as for electronic health records, electronic medical records, health information systems, hospital management systems, and regulation systems, aiming to improve the quality of and the access to health care services. By systematically collecting and processing data about patients, eHealth could enable health care providers (including physicians, hospitals, nurses, and government health agencies) to respond more quickly and effectively to adverse situations. In this scenario, eHealth could be considered a System-of-Systems (SoS) that is evolutionarily developed from geographically distributed, independent constituent systems. The problem addressed in this project rises from the inherent difficulty of enabling the interoperability among constituents of an eHealth SoS, which can lead to patient care impairment and even death due to inefficient, incompatible eHealth systems, including Brazilian health systems.The main objective of this project is to create a software architecture for a real eHealth SoS that is designed to cope with changing constituent systems and operational environments, i.e., its architecture must be sustainable.This architecture will be quantitatively and qualitatively evaluated with stakeholders and health care providers at the Medical School of Ribeirão Preto (FMRP-USP). As main result, this architecture is expected to support the development and evolution of this eHealth SoS, which will also meet the particular needs of Brazilian health institutions. Moreover, this project will further the contributions of the candidate's doctorate project (FAPESP 2012/24290-5, 01/06/2013 to 30/09/2017) and a larger research project (FAPESP 2017/06195-9, 01/07/2017 to 30/06/2019) being developed in collaboration with international research institutions.