This document will describe the architectural design of an Interoperability Layer for use within the OpenHIE project. It describes the key components that should make up an interoperability layer and how this relates to the other service that are used in OpenHIE.
The interoperability layer considers of 2 separate sets of components:
Together these 2 sets of components make up an interoperability layer. These can be seen in the diagram below. In the following section we will describe each of these in more details.
The full requirements that the Interoperability Layer community have identified can be found here: What is an Interoperability Layer?
Here are the key list of requirements that are seen as beneficial for an interoperability layer:
This component can be through of as the entry point into the HIE. In provides some common mundane services so that other domain services don't have to implement these. This component basically just acts as a web service proxy while performing some additional functions on the incoming requests. The functions that this component should perform are as follow:
This component makes use of several other services in order to perform the functions mentioned above. These can be external services and we can likely use existing software components to fulfil these functions. The required services are explained below:
The interoperability layer core component contacts each one of these services when it receives a message to ensure the appropriate information is stored. It then passes the message on to the router where it is sent to the correct upstream service. The routers make use of a publish and subscribe pattern so that messages can be routed to multiple interested parties. This allows for secondary use of the messages received by the HIE. For example, encounter message could be routed to the SHR as well as a agggregation service where they could be aggregated and submitted to an aggregate data store such as DHIS. There are 2 types of routers:
This set of components provides services that manipulate the request that are sent to them. They are often implementation specific so they will change as the use cases that the HIE supports change. Each of these components are separate services that perform a specific function following the micro services architecture (http://yobriefca.se/blog/2013/04/29/micro-service-architecture/). There are 2 major types of these services:
These services are invoked whenever there is a need to orchestrate or adapt a certain transaction. If they are not needed the core interoperability layer component will just call the domain service directly. Designing these as independent services allows additional logic or business processes to be included in the HIE as the need arises. This allows the architecture to grow as the environment changes.
With the interoerpability layer being a central component of the health information exchange there are a number of features that present themselves. Some of these are positive features and other are negative features. These are listed below:
Certificate management is centralised, this allows for easier management and setup.
Domain services don’t have to all implement functionality to audit, log and authenticate message thus making them simpler.
Allows messages to be easily intercepted for secondary use which is benaficial to enable additional functions as the HIE grows.
Could be a dependency knot when other services have to join the exchange as this central component will have to be configured for each change - can be mitigated by allowing simple pass through of web services via configuration, thus the changes are in configuration only.