A Distributed E-Healthcare System

In this chapter we describe a distributed e-healthcare system that uses service oriented architecture as a basis for designing, implementing, deploying, invoking and managing healthcare services. The ehealthcare system that we have developed provides support for patients, physicians, nurses, pharmacists and other healthcare professionals, as well as for medical monitoring devices, such as blood pressure monitors. The system transmits e-prescriptions from physicians to pharmacists over the Internet. It offers multimedia input and output, including text, images and speech, to provide a human-friendly interface, with the computers and networks hidden from the user. IntroductIon According to Carmen Catizone of the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy (Catizone, 2002), there are as many as 7,000 deaths from incorrect prescriptions in the United States each year. A Washington Post article (Weiss, 1999) indicates that as many as 5% of the 3 billion prescriptions filled each year are incorrect. In the United States Institute of Medicine report, To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System, Kohn et al. (USIOM, 2000) discuss human errors in the workplace: Human beings, in all lines of work, make errors. Errors can be prevented by designing systems that make it hard for people to do the wrong thing and easy for people to do the right thing.

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