Web services for healthcare management

Nowadays, Health Care Organizations (HCOs) are interested in defining methodologies of Information Technology (IT) for providing high quality services at minimum cost. Through modern software and hardware, they can process data and manage the three important phases: diagnosis, prognosis, and therapy. In this scenario, Web Technologies (WTs) can: provide advanced Information Systems that combine software applications; offer a heterogeneous connectivity to users; allow costs reduction; improve the delivery of the services; guarantee an interactive support of the doctors, interconnectivity between the HCOs, and effective information sharing. In this chapter, first it is described how to provide the services of a HCO through the WTs, and then it is shown how Operations Research makes it more effective, to deal with, for example, clinical data classification problem, clinical predictions, clinical what-if analysis, and Web services composition process.