BS EN 12967-3:2007 provides guidance for the description, planning and development of new systems as well as for the integration of existing information systems, both within one enterprise and across different healthcare organisations through an architecture integrating the common data and business logic into a specific architectural layer (i.e. the middleware), distinct from individual applications and accessible throughout the whole information system through services
BS EN 12967-3:2007 specifies the fundamental characteristics of the computational model to be implemented by a specific architectural layer of the information system (i.e. the middleware) to provide a comprehensive and integrated interface to the common enterprise information and to support the fundamental business processes of the healthcare organisation, as defined in BS EN 12967-1:2007 “Health Informatics. Service architecture. Enterprise viewpoint. The computational model is specified without any explicit or implicit assumption about the physical technologies, tools or solutions to be adopted for its physical implementation in the various target scenarios. The specification is nevertheless formal, complete and nonambiguous enough to allow implementers to derive an efficient design of the system in the specific technological environment that will be selected for the physical implementation.
The computational model provides the basis for ensuring consistency between different engineering and technology specifications (including programming languages and communication mechanisms) since they must be consistent with the same computational object model. This consistency allows open inter-working and portability of components in the resulting implementation.
BS EN 12967-3:2007 does not aim at representing a fixed, complete, specification of all possible interfaces that may be necessary for any requirement of any healthcare enterprise. It specifies only a set of characteristics in terms of overall organisation and individual computational objects, identified as fundamental and common to all healthcare organisations, and that are satisfied by the computational model implemented by the middleware.
Preserving consistency with the provisions of this standard, physical implementations shall allow extensions to the standard computational model in order to support additional and local requirements. Extensions shall include both the definition of additional properties in the objects of the standard model and the implementation of entirely new objects.
BS EN 12967-3:2007 shall be extendable over time according to the evolution of the applicable standardisation initiatives. The specification of extensions shall be carried out according to the methodology defined in BS EN 12967-1:2007, which identifies a set of healthcare common information services, describing their need and the methodology through which they will be used. These are only the minimal identifiable set of services according to the needs of the healthcare enterprise, and constituting the 'middleware' platform (i.e. integration platform) to serve as the basis for healthcare applications, e.g. EHR or patient administration.
