Microservice Based Architecture Referral for Health Information Exchange With Patient Authorization for Hmis – Kenya

Abstract

In this current century, health care in organizations can be improved among other factors with proper health care information systems. According to Yasser (2017), health care across the world has been greatly impacted by speedy development and automation of health information systems. Further, Tavakoli (2020) agrees by stating that COVID 19 did the least disruption in areas where automation had been fully implemented. Tavakoli cites that companies like Amazon that had already heavily invested in automated robotics in its centers had a great positive impact in providing robust shipment of medical supplies that rescued the situation earlier enough before it worsened. Lack of a system to automate Patients’ Referral in referral hospitals in Kenya is the driving force towards designing and testing a Microservice systems which has the capabilities of scalability, resilience and most importantly which is faulty tolerant. Bob (2015) defines a Microservice as an agile approach of service-oriented architecture that structures a software as combination of loosely coupled and autonomous services whose communication is dependent on the lightweight communication protocol. Descriptive research design was used to establish the status of the current patients’ referral system where questionnaires were used to collect data from sampled population that was identified and analyzed by simple tabulation where results were obtained. To tackle the problems and gaps that were identified from the respondents’ feedback, a microservice based system to automate the referral process, patients’ vital transmission from IoT devices from patients and access to patients’ medical history with the patients’ consent was presented using an agile methodology. In this system the latest technologies were used, and they include: Microservices, IoT and REST APIs integration, interoperability technologies and web programming. In evaluating the system over the existing manual system using 100 real users from each group as test case 100 results were obtained in the test scenarios using the software protype developed as part of this work. It was realized that 99 percent of the users carried out the referral process with a positive impact in reduced time in the referral process as compared to the manual process.