A HEALTHY ARCHITECTURE FOR MUNICIPAL CARE

Abstract

Municipal care organizations in the Netherlands each take care of public health in one of 28 regions. Currently these organizations are incapable of providing a seamless customer experience due to the lack of interoperability. The problem of interoperability is not unique for the care sector and occurs in many contexts. Research shows that the problems that need to be tackled to achieve interoperability have to do with semantics and business-IT alignment. This research aims to provide a reference architecture that ensures interoperability within municipal care organizations. This is achieved by implementing enterprise architecture at a single municipal care organization which will be the unit of analysis. From the lessons learned in this context the problem is cast onto the problem class of chain computerization. A reference architecture is created by bringing the problems described in literature together with the solutions applied in the research context. This reference architecture provides normative principles for implementing enterprise architecture at municipal care organizations. Applying these principles will help the organization formalize the internal processes and information flow. The service oriented nature of enterprise architecture will then enable the identification and realization of possible interfaces between organizations and organizational units. By identifying the information objects used throughout the organization and modeling these in a corporate concept data model (CCDM) redundancy can be reduced while reusability of information increases. This eventually leads to central concepts such as “customer” which is the same throughout the organization. Services for such a customer now share this concept so that they become uniform and customer centric. Other concepts and their attributes can then be related and traced back to each other so that interoperability between processes and their resulting services may be achieved, increasing efficiency, information integrity and a better customer experience.