A Decoupled Health Software Architecture using Microservices and OpenEHR Archetypes
Marcio Alexandre, Valéria Cesário, André Magno, Paulo Caetano · International Journal of Computer Applications · 2020
Coupling is a challenge in software engineering, because errors or failures compromise the whole software execution.To address this issue in the healthcare domain, a Decoupled Health Software Architecture (DHSA) is proposed in this paper.This study presents the development of three components, a tool, and a formal metric.The Connector, Container and Archetype-based microservice (Archemicro) components make the DHSA, which is dynamically generated by the Microservice4EHR tool.For assessing, a legacy software used in Brazilian hospitals is migrated to the DHSA.A comparison is performed between three tools (MARCIA, Template4EHR, and EhrScape).The Archetype-based Software Architecture Coupling (ASAC) is a formal metric to measure the coupling level of Health software architectures.As a result, DHSA increases by 66,6% the decoupling index of the healthcare software.The healthcare domain therefore is benefited with a software architecture that maintains the software operation even if a component from the software architecture causes errors.