Technical specifications of a service-oriented architecture for semantic interoperability of EHR — electronic health records

Many countries are in the run for implementing their national electronic health strategies, on top of the existing health systems administrative and clinical procedures. There have been international successful initiatives in these cases, however, a substantial effort is necessary in order to adapt the best practices to national realities. In Brazil, the effort of implementing a technological solution, inspired by these international cases, is under way. This paper describes the technical specification of an implementation architecture for a SOA-based infrastructure that created the Electronic Health Record solutions for the Brazilian public health system. We identified here, the context where it has been implemented and particular need of the National e-health strategy, the information health management standards and patterns used. We described the SOA architecture built and implemented, aiming at specific needs at stake, such as basic care, hospital, medicines and individual patient's information. The basic EHR profiles used are also described with an emphasis on specific use cases. The integrated solution implemented was also presented in a general design that brings together, in a simplified manner, the components of a semantically interoperable SOA architecture for electronic health records designed specifically for the Brazilian health context, but we hope can be an asset and success case for other ongoing e-health strategy design initiatives.