XML-based application interface services--a method to enhance integrability of disease specific systems.

Abstract

Disease specific systems usually offer excellent functionality for the management of the covered diseases. But the restriction to a certain disease also often hampers their wide spread use since they aren't optimised for clinical workflow. The Giessener Tumordokumentationssystem (GTDS) is such a disease specific system. It is not only designed for the use in tumour registries but also to support clinical care. In order to integrate it into hospital information systems, we implemented standard communication interfaces, but this measure is not sufficient since it doesn't consider aspects of the normal workflow of a clinical user. Therefore, we developed a strategy that should ease the access to the system in the environment of existing systems. From the technical point of view, XML with its capabilities to represent even complex data in a rather simple way helped to implement this strategy. We use it to communicate with API-like services and also created a WWW environment to demonstrate the access to these services. Since this environment itself is a means to integrate systems, we intend to expand this environment to an appropriate region based means to improve the communication with registries. multidisciplinary environments [3]. The large amount of useful functions and its adaptability has made GTDS (http://www.gtds.de) a successful system in more than 30 various registries.