CVLBA SODA

Nowadays information technology (IT) is one of the most important aspects in the health care domain. IT can act as an enabler for new or improved medical processes. Many projects exist that try to utilize the benefits of IT in health care. One famous example is the introduction of the new electronic health card in Germany.

Missing integration concepts causing deficits in information logistics are common to health care systems. Some possible reasons for these deficits are heterogeneous distributed computer systems and media disruption which causes difficulties in integrating information, especially across several health care institutions. “Seamless Health Care” as a vision intends to enable both vertical (institutional) and horizontal (over time) information exchanges for every patient. 

The objective of the project is the exploration of possibilities for realizing the idea of “Seamless Health Care“. This implicates the solving of real existing problems in health institutions by considering technical and economical aspects. At the moment, the concept of Service Oriented Device Architecture (SODA) is explored in the context of medical devices in hospitals.

At first specific problem areas are identified and appropriate solutions are developed as well as subsequent tested in the field. In a second step, the solutions to be developed will be evaluated and optimized using the experiences gained from the analysis of the field test results’.

Through the development of solutions for the purpose of achieving seamless health care, several benefits are expected:

• Cost reductions by raising the efficiency of the care provider side
• Raising the quality of care by optimizing computerized supported clinical pathways
• Increasing the usability of health care systems by intelligent behavior of the applications
• Improving the consistency of the application landscape in hospital settings

It was shown that interoperability is an almost non-existent feature of medical devices. Thus the concept of service oriented device integration seems to be a promising idea for providing benefits on various levels. In further research this presumption will be proofed and a solution design will be developed and evaluated. As a first step, the specifics of device services in comparison to software services were analyzed and SODA specific design problems were derived. Afterwards, solutions for these problems were expressed in the form of design patterns. In a next step, these patterns will be implemented and evaluated on a concrete scenario. 

• http://cvlba.in.tum.de/home

• Prof. Dr. Jan Marco Leimeister