The application of information and communication technologies in the healthcare industry is a complex undertaking. Various standards have evolved in recent years in an attempt to maintain consistency in the face of the ever-increasing numbers of applications in this sector. Among these is the Health Informatics Service Architecture (HISA) standard, adopted by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in 2009 as ISO 12967 [1]. The HISA standard provides a framework for system specification, following the viewpoints of the Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP).

The authors of the paper describe research they have conducted on extending the HISA standard. First, they explore formalization of the HISA viewpoints using the ISO 19793 standard (UML4ODP) [2]. Second, they extend HISA to cover security and access control issues. The ultimate goal is to inform further refinement and extension of the HISA standard, and to inspire future research into healthcare architectural specification using complementary frameworks and standards.

This paper will be of interest to software architects and systems engineers working in the healthcare field, or to technical professionals interested in the detailed, formal architecture of healthcare systems. Regardless of background, the reader should have some prior knowledge of RM-ODP and HISA standards.