Security-Aware Service Specification for Healthcare Information Systems

With the rapid advancement of Web-based technologies, healthcare information systems are becoming increasingly heterogeneous in terms of their architecture, composition, and runtime characteristics. A healthcare system can be composed of several stand-alone service components, such as Web services available from various distributed sources for runtime execution. We use the terms Web services and service interchangeably in this chapter to refer to the same concept. A healthcare application system can be composed of multiple autonomous geographically dispersed software services. A healthcare software service is autonomous as it has its own executable code and uses its own data or files. The composition of a healthcare system can be dynamic or static, depending on how services are connected to each other to provide the services. Some of the services are downloaded directly from the Internet and executed dynamically with the application system. The use of independent services in the healthcare information system is appealing because it supports reusability of code and far efficient utilization of network resources, and it might be cost efficient.