Software interoperability of telemedicine systems: A CSCW perspective

Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) provides a fusion of the understanding of organisational processes with communication technologies. Telemedicine involves an integration of networking technologies with health-care processes. Since different modalities of patient care require applications running on heterogeneous computing environment, interoperability is a major issue in telemedicine. Software interoperability provides two distinctly classified benefits - benefits for the users of the system and benefits to the development and maintenance of the system. Software interoperability between different applications can be modeled at different levels of abstractions such as physical interoperability, data-type interoperability, specification-level interoperability and semantic interoperability. Various mechanisms exist to resolve the problem at different levels. This paper presents the design issues of an inter-operable CSCW system in a distributed health-care environment through an illustrative study in the area area of telecardiology.