Serviceorientierte Integration medizinischer Geräte - Ganzheitliche IT-Unterstützung klinischer Prozesse

German hospitals often face major shortcomings in their information logistics. This is caused by media frictions, isolated systems, lacking interoperability of systems and organizational limitations. In consequence, efficacy and efficiency losses of medical and administrative processes as well as the quality of treatment have to be stated. A current trend in the field of software systems in healthcare are service oriented architectures (SOA) to address historically grown heterogeneous IT infrastructures. Medical devices are an essential part ofmedical processes but they remain unconsidered bymost approaches. Applying the concept of SOA to the integration of medical devices seems to be very promising. This could enable a concise and comprehensive integration of all sources of information and therefore a seamless IT support of clinical processes. This article provides an overview of the concept of service oriented device integration (SODA). It especially focuses on challenges when designing solution architectures based on this concept as well as design patterns that try to solve the specific design problems.