網路醫學資訊系統之可擴充性與容錯機制

Due to the steady progress on broadband network technology, it becomes
feasible to extend many services to the networked environment. This project, a
network medical information system, is one of the good examples, that makes
medical treatment services ubiquitous through the widely-spread network systems
in the world. In this way, patients can register to a hospital at home through the
Internet, and doctors also give medical care through the Internet. At the same
time, doctors can fetch related data such as case history or medical photographs
placed in remote database systems on the Internet to help making diagnoses. In
other word, this is the concrete realization of a “networked hospital”. We choose
the distributed object technology to implement the system. It not only increases
system efficiency but also is of great help in system extensibility and
maintenance.
There are a few competing distributed object technologies and we choose:
DCOM (Distributed Component Object Model) by Microsoft to implement the
system. Although DCOM is used, we also try to make use of the advantages in
other technology to maximize system performance. During the execution process
of this sub-project, we studied these distributed object technologies in depth, and
acquired much useful knowledge from them. After that, a simplified version of
the network medical information has been implemented in the whole project. We
not only acquired much experience of DCOM programming but also researched
issues such as service efficienty, system reliability, extensibility, and fault
tolerance mechanisms during the development of the system.
It is foreseen that Internet applications will be based on distributed objects
in the near future. The progress on this topic is very fast in the industry, and we
have to keep pace with it in the academia. With the development of the medical information system on the Internet, we have acquired useful experiences of the
implementation details using distributed object technology, and the project will
build up a solid foundation on the development of other broadband network
services.