Data logistics as a means of integration in healthcare applications

Information integration is still a crucial issue in healthcare applications. Most clinical applications are determined by a huge variety of heterogeneous and independent work places, most of them equipped with specialized clinical hardware. Due to this it is almost impossible -- at least not feasible -- to run a common database system storing all relevant data of a clinical application. Nevertheless these clinical applications have to share their data. Our solution to this integration problem is to facilitate so called Process based Data Logistics. This approach is based on the integration capabilities of process management; however it does not coordinate the staff working in the healthcare domain in a restricting sense, but coordinates data sources and data sinks of these applications.