A pub/sub based architecture to support public healthcare data exchange

Abstract

Data exchange plays an important role in public healthcare. Having timely access to right data can allow detection of the spread of a disease, assess effectiveness of government schemes, etc. In order to improve policies and provide awareness, various government healthcare schemes are run which generate a huge amount of data. This data is collected by number of field workers and is then transferred to central repositories for further analysis. While the data eventually reaches researchers and scientist for analysis, the delay (usually in months) hampers timely actions that can be taken. In this paper, we propose a Publish/Subscribe based Architecture moderated through a web service that can enable an early exchange of healthcare data among different interested parties e.g. doctors, researchers, and policy makers. Our architecture handles the privacy and security requirements, and also provides interoperability support for data exchange. We have also highlighted how the architecture deals with the key challenges involved in public health information exchange.