Site map

Numerous design and usability guidelines suggested that a site map is necessary for every

web site (Farkas & Farkas, 2000; Nielson, 2002). A well designed site map mirrors its

associated web site contents, link structures accordingly. It can alleviate users’

bewilderment during web navigating (Bernard, 1999), to understand an overview of a site

topology, and to search for required information quickly and accurately (Dieberger, 1997;

Kim & Hirtle, 1995; Li et al., 2001). In principle, the criteria for prominent large web site

maps can be summarized as: 1) capable of covering the contents of Web sites; 2) capable of

supporting navigation via visualized Web site topologies; 3) flexible to illustrate or render

the web contents and link structures imposing hidden or flatten descriptions, i.e., with

multiple granularity of details or topic-focused; 4) enabling site maps construction

automatically (Li et al., 2001; Yip, 2004; Inder et al., 1998; Danielson, 2002). In addition, Li,

Ayan, and et al. (Li et al., 2001) identify the site maps must be informative and

representative indicated by citation analyses.

Although doctors can be slow adapters of new information technology (Tsai et al., 2005;

Cheng et al., 2004), the availability of any data, at any time, from any place, changes the

healthcare infrastructures dynamically via web portal.

3. Design Objectives & Requirements

According to the problems described in the Background, we design a new portal to solve

them. Planning for the portal implementation should be seen as a process of building an

infrastructure, foundation for the future, not as developing of a single all-encompassing

solution. Therefore, the new portal has to satisfy the requirements as listed:

A Dynamic Healthcare Portal Design and Enhancements 31

1) The new portal demands integrating the interface of multi-system authentication and

authorization, i.e., Single Sign on Service (SSOS) interface. It validates user’s authentication

as well as access control capabilities. The capabilities are visualized in menu selections based

upon user’s authorization. If a user has no authority to access certain functions, the

selections will be invisible.

2) The new portal main page ought to be well organized and hierarchical. It needs cover

over 300 menu selections for clinicians and administrative staff usages. The selections

provide function linkages to HIS (Outpatient, Inpatient, and Emergency Information

Systems (Ko et al., 2006)), Healthcare Supporting Services (Critical Healthcare Alerts,

Medical Report Review Services, and Consultation Services), Administrative Information

System (Human Resources, Medicine Inventory, and Accounting), as well as others.

Therefore, a hierarchical, drop-down navigation menu system architecture is inevitable.

3) The function linkages vary frequently; a dynamic menu configuration and generation

must be manipulated effectively and efficiently.

4) The portal supports two bulletin boards in one web page, one for HIS, the other for

administrative purpose. Furthermore, the boards require supporting real time, on-line

features.

5) Because of the large numbers of linkages, the performance of main page rendering is

concerned.

6) At present, NTUH HIS is under developing. The portal acquires to correctly redirect to

developing, testing, or on-line production servers instantaneously.

4. System description & implementation

After requirement analyses, NTUH HIS has been developed, deployed based upon the

middleware multi-tier infrastructure, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) technologies

(Papazoglou, 2003; Papazoglou & Heuvel, 2007), i.e., Web Services (Krafzig et al., 2005;

Shepherd et al., 2000).NET. SOA represents the current pinnacle of interoperability, in

which HIS resources distributed over networks are available as individual, loosely-coupled

and independent services (Freudenstein et al., 2007; Murray, 2003; Bunge et al., 2008; Lewis

et al., 2007). SOA is a desirable and inevitable solution to integrate diverse platforms,

database as well as further merging, extending into NTUH HIS. The overall NTUH HIS

frameworks are depicted in Figure 1. Within the diagram, individual components are

described as followings.