Object technology: raising the standards for healthcare information systems

Netscape and the public Internet have accelerated the acceptance of many different open "Internet standards". Through wide acceptance of its browser, Netscape gave a boost to the Java programming language helping it become truly platform independent. Objects written in Java are ideal building blocks for application components. CORBA gives such objects the ability to communicate and operate over networks. Applications built with these distributed objects become the services in an Internet-wide healthcare framework. The convergence of object technologies has raised the standards for modern healthcare information systems. To illustrate the relationship among such technologies, this paper presents an architecture for a Universal Healthcare Information System (UHIS) in terms of its web, Java and CORBA components.