Exploiting service oriented architectures for the design of e-health systems

The design of e-Health systems is a hard task since their requirements are complex and heterogeneous. These systems merge functional requirements with an important set of non-functional requirement like security, safety, standardization or technology related constraints concerning the hardware and software components to be used. The ICT research community has proposed recently architectural models for the development of open and dynamic distributed systems centered on the concept of "service". This approach has been followed by all the major actors of ICT for their frameworks due to its adaptation to the World-Wide-Web. This paper is a position paper where we analyze the current status and needs for e-Health systems and the limitation upon them. We present the main characteristics of middlewares that follow a service-oriented architecture and we explain how these frameworks could be exploited, as a vision to the future, to design e-health systems for a better insurance of their functional and non-functional requirements.