Impact of Information Technology on the Quality of Health Services

摘要

The chapter offers a report on the impact of health information technology on quality of services, work efficiency and related costs of healthcare. The major benefits on quality of health services are considered to be the increased adequacy to standard based care procedures, improved surveillance and decreased medication errors. The key solution to improve the quality of the health services is considered to be the implementation of the Service-oriented Interoperability Paradigm for specifying and standardizing medical services. The chapter demonstrates that Health Level Seven (HL7) specification fits in the context of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) that support enterprise distributed processing. The dynamic model of SOA Interoperability Paradigm and its compatibility with the Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) are then analyzed, in order to ensure interoperability between applications based on the HL7 Version 3 Standard. Finally the architecture of a system that implements the principles of the HSSP/HL7 SOA methodology and its specific objectives are presented.