A methodology to identify health and social care web services on the basis of case stories

There is an increasing adoption of Service-oriented architecture (SOA) to develop interoperable open platforms that integrate heterogeneous information systems in healthcare. One of the challenging tasks in the SOA design is the identification of web services to be implemented, that is usually based on business process modelling. This paper presents a comprehensive and consistent methodology able to detect all functional requirements and web services based on the analysis of case stories built using semi-structured interviews to the different stakeholders involved in the care process. These narrative descriptions are the starting point to define a formal pictorial representation using the Unified Modelling Language (UML) use case and sequence diagrams that allow analysts and programmers to identify web services to be implemented to support the communication between subjects (patient, providers) and objects (device, systems) in real-life contexts. This methodology has been adopted within the Health@Home project that provides a technological and organizational solution to support both citizens and organizations in the provision of health and social services in the home setting.