A Federation of Web Services for Danish Health Care

Having relevant, up-to-date information about a patient's health care history is often crucial for providing the appropriate treatment. In Denmark, IT systems have been built to support different work flows in the health sector, but the systems are rarely connected and have become islands of data. To remedy this situation, a service-oriented architecture based on web services for online exchange of health care data between the vast array of heterogeneous IT systems in the sector is being built. The architecture forms a federation of web services and enables secure and reliable authentication of end-users and systems in the Danish health sector. The architecture is based on national and international standards and specifications.