Improving communication in the Dutch multi-agency emergency healthcare: Applying Enterprise Integration Patterns to cross communication barriers
Summary
In this study it was investigated what architectural design could facilitate an optimal information delivery in the emergency healthcare, what resulted in a communication infrastructure for the emergency healthcare sector. With this communication infrastructure communication between disciplines in the emergency healthcare can be achieved, exchanging information in ways that was not possible before.
It was identified that information in the emergency healthcare sector is often not shared between these disciplines, thus the objective was to enable inter-enterprise communication between these disciplines. Upon investigation of the emergency healthcare sector, it became clear that little to none IT-solutions to enable such inter-enterprise communication are available but are gravely needed to resolve the challenges that the emergency healthcare sector are plaguing nowadays. Challenges consist of but are not limited to insight in bed capacity, insight in medical history for ambulance staff on location, and transfer of medical information from the dispatch center, ambulance, and emergency department to the General Practitioner's (GP) records \cite{nictizcosts}.
The result of this study is therefore a communication infrastructure for the emergency healthcare to enable inter-enterprise communication. The communication infrastructure is created and implemented based on Rozanski's guidelines for software architecture design \cite{rozanski2011software}. The implementation served as an evaluation of the architectural design.
The evaluation showed that the followed methodology yielded the expected software architecture, with a notable role for the perspectives, that in iterations revisited the created viewpoints and adapted them according to the validation results. Thanks to that minimal trade-offs between the design and the implementation were found. The application of Enterprise Integration Patterns proved to provide a solid foundation for a from-theory derived practical approach to incorporate communication infrastructures in software architecture. An analysis of the implementation showed that the implementation satisfies the requirements as provided by the stakeholders, demonstrating that integration can take place as they have desired.