HQuantum© Enables Interoperability

In order to improve the delivery of healthcare services, healthcare providers working in a multi-agency environment must cooperate. Achieving true cooperation among two or more organizations means that they are able to collaborate at all levels and stages of their enterprise architecture. Cooperation in this complex environment is multi-faceted and should consider the following levels.

The Connectivity level. It includes the use of established protocols (e.g TCP/IP) to enable the systems of different enterprises to “talk” to each other.

The Communication level. Effective collaboration between organisations is impossible without efficient and effective communication. The use of application protocols, such as SMTP, HTTP, FTP and SOAP, enables this communication both at system and individual user level.

The Collaboration/Coordination level. At the present time, different organisations may already employ established protocols which enable network connectivity. They may also have systems and applications which comply with the full range of application protocols, but these steps alone will not enable or support the true interoperation of their business and professional processes. The introduction of HQuantum© enables true process interoperability.

Business process interoperability is characterized as the ability of business activities of one party to interact positively with those of another party, whether or not these business activities belong to different units of the same organization or to different organizations.

Adhering to common standards enables this interoperability. In order to allow process interoperability among a network of organizations, each information system should have a shared set of business processes exchanging data through the adoption of the same semantic standards. The historical development of IT within different organizations has produced various and disparate processes.

This lack of commonality is a block to full process interoperability. The removal of this block is the strength of HQuantum© as it supplies a pre-defined set of standard business processes (derived from HSSP compliancy) and services for standardizing data to be shared.

Non-standard business processes of organizations operating within HQuantum© environment are matched and translated into the standard business processes defined within HQuantum©. This enables true process interoperability without the need to change those processes.