A Simplified Architecture to Integrate and Interoperate Heterogeneous and Distributed Healthcare Data

The different health organizations are using various databases having different data models to store healthcare data. Those electronic data are significant to integrate for providing urgent information about the patient and better quality treatment. Information retrieval is the first condition from a heterogeneous environment to integrate and interoperate data. Three main challenges are facing in the time of information retrieval from heterogeneous and distributed databases: (i) resolving the structural or data model variability, (ii) bridging among various data querying syntaxes, and (iii) mitigating semantic heterogeneity of data created in data storing time. The aim of this paper is how to retrieve data effectively from heterogeneous and distributed healthcare databases, whether to use standard or various other data models. We here propose a simplified architecture to integrate and interoperate data among different databases having distinct nature and query language developed by different vendors. Also, a client API is implemented pragmatically to retrieve data from MySQL, MarkLogic, and Apache Cassandra. The primarily implemented part of our proposed architecture retrieves data from different databases successfully and efficiently.