Simulating collaboration from multiple, potentially non-collaborative healthcare systems to create a single view of a patient

There is still significant investment in legacy healthcare information technology (HIT). Current systems are a diverse mix of technologies, standards, platforms and versions. Many of which were never intended to be used together to achieve a common goal. In order to deliver care effectively and efficiently, point-of-care software must navigate this complex maze, coordinating multiple disparate systems, to produce as holistic a view as possible of a patient's treatment history, in a timely manner. In this paper, we introduce a specific problem of enabling the collaboration of HIT to facilitate data ingest and integration, present a solution approach and describe a software embodiment that was deployed. © 2010 ICST.