Referral communication model between primary health centers and hospitals using web services

A referral system is the setting of delegation of tasks and responsibilities for health-care services from one health-care unit to others. The main problem in the current referral system is that it is often quite slow. The process of obtaining a referral hospital still takes a long time because searching for hospitals involves contacting them one by one by telephone. The average time required to refer a patient is then more than 34 minutes, which is quite long because doctors in the primary health centers must contact an average of 5 hospitals. After obtaining a referral hospital, doctors at the hospital still have to perform a reexamination because the doctor at the primary health center often does not include the results of the initial examination. To resolve these problems, it is necessary to develop applications that can contact the referral hospitals simultaneously and can perform data transmission of the results of the initial examination to the hospitals. The proposed referral system employs web service technology with the restful methods. Based on the experiments, an average response time of 1.41 minutes from 5 hospitals simultaneously can be achieved.