Choompol Boonmee, Tawa Khampachua and Romayong Surakitbunharn
For the receiver side, figure 8 shows screen layout of e‐CMS receiving letter information entry page. On the left side the web page before modification is shown. It consists of receiving letter input fields and‘ Save’ button. When receiver party receives paper based letter, the end user uses this screen to enter the letter’ s information, then press the‘ Save’ button to store the information entered. On the right side the web page after modification is shown. The‘ Inbound letter’ button is added into the page. This appears when some letters have been received through eCMSX. By pressing the button the eCMSX’ s received letter information will be populated into the text fields automatically. This mechanism enables letter information to be transferred electronically with user’ s recognition. This interconnection development technique helps developing easier by modifying only two html pages without deeper knowledge about the legacy software.
Figure 8: Correspondence Letter Management System( e‐CMS) receiver screen ' s web page modification
The second experiment is the interconnection development of laboratory information system( LIM) software. The experiment is performed by department of medical science. The department has several sample testing laboratories distributed around the country. Each lab is established to provide sample lab testing services specialized for its located area. For example if the lab is located in industrial area there would be specialized laboratory supporting product testing and environmental testing. So far each lab has developed its own laboratory information systems( LIM). The LIM software is different to each other. The development of various LIM interconnections becomes hard, expensive and much time consumed.
As a centralized administration office, the lab analysis service reports are required to be integrated. The department develops data center software to collect the lab analysis service reports electronically from several LIMs as shown in figure 9. LIM standardized data set and standard XML schema has been developed. The Data center software is connected to several LIMs through EDI‐lim module by using the XML standard format. In this experiment, instead of modifying existing LIM software, client side web page modification technique has been used. There are two parts; LIM client side web page modification part( LimMod # 1) and data interchange processing part( EDI‐lim).
Figure 10 shows an example of LIM screen layout of lab analysis data entry and its mechanism behind. The data entry screen includes sample ID, sample name, test result, tester and‘ Save’ button. No visible change of the page has been modified. Instead when the entry data is submitted by pressing‘ Save’ button, LimsMod # 1 performs the communication stream filtering then catches the information on the fly then it sends to data center software through EDI‐lim as illustrated in the figure. The proposed technique is also used in the interconnection development successfully.
5. Conclusions
The software interconnection development is hard, expensive and time consumed since legacy software systems are heterogeneous and have very little interoperability. In the case of Thailand, data standardization is the selected method to solve the interoperability problem. Presently mostly deployed software systems were developed using web page technology. In order to achieve the interconnection, those software systems need to be modified. Modifying legacy software systems is difficult due to many reasons; poor documentations, poor source code management and etc. To enable those systems to interoperate with other legacy systems requires expensive investment and a long period of time.
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