Policy-based Data Integration for e-Health Monitoring Processes in a B2B Environment: Experiences from Canada

eHealth processes are data-focused, event-driven, and dynamic. They are systematically monitored for compliance with legislation, organizational guidelines and quality of care protocols. Community care, especially at home care, frequently requires the cooperation and integration of care processes across several providers and organizations. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) through Web services and business process automation through Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) is emerging as a framework for business process integration over the Internet, but does not address all information management requirements of eHealth monitoring processes particularly with respect to policy compliance and event-based data integration. In this paper, we extend the traditional SOA framework to define a flexible policy-based approach for defining and monitoring streaming event data based on a general publish/subscribe model in a business-to-business (B2B) healthcare network. The work described here is design-oriented research where the purpose is to show the utility of the proposed framework. The approach is evaluated based on information management requirements drawn from a case study of palliative care and a prototype implementation.