INTRODUCTION Building integrated services in a primary care setting is considered an essential important strategy for establishing a high-quality and affordable health care system. The theoretical foundations of such integrated service models are described by the Rainbow Model of Integrated Care, which distinguishes six integration dimensions (clinical, professional, organisational, system, fun...

The evolution of the global telecommunications industry into an open services market presents developers of telecommunication service and management systems with many new challenges. Increased competition, complex service provision chains and integrated service offerings require effective techniques for the rapid integration of service and management systems over multiple organisational domains...

BACKGROUND The clinical research workforce within nursing is growing including those employed to lead studies, coordinate research and many hybrid roles. Several studies have reported high job satisfaction among research nurses. However, there have also been reports of limited options for career development and professional integration, likely reflecting typical informal, departmentally based m...

This paper describes a new method to integrate and implement e-commerce systems in distributed computing environments, especially the Internet. In this paper, we propose a core part of ontology repositories for e-commerce systems, illustrate the organisational topology of the repositories, and demonstrate how to use XML standards to build the repositories. After all these repositories are distr...

This paper describes the potential benefits of VLE Library system integration to learners, libraries and content providers and examines the role of emerging authentication technologies in facilitating the practical realisation of such integration. It reports on the activities of the 4i Project (Interoperable Institutional, Integrated Implementation) led by the University of Ulster in collaborat...

Structural changes and increasing market dynamics in the healthcare sector intensify the health providers’ need for cost-savings and process optimisation. To address actual drawbacks the adoption of eHealth is currently seen as opportunity to improve not only effectiveness and efficiency but also quality of health services. Data quality aspects will therefore gain in importance. As the actual u...

Recent advances in information, operations and networking technologies have brought forth many economical and organisational opportunities for industrial enterprises. One of the enabling pillars for the exploitation of these opportunities hinges predominantly on the design and introduction of frictionless vertical integration in enterprises. The paper presented concerns itself with the generati...

This paper presents Presence-based, Context-sensitive Real-Time Collaboration (RTC), a new and emerging eCollaboration technology that has its roots in both the telecommunications and groupware market. The aim of the paper is twofold. Firstly, it offers a conceptualisation of RTC consisting of usage scenarios and four main building blocks – integration of communication channels, presenceawarene...

INTRODUCTION Although several measurement instruments have been developed to measure the level of integrated health care delivery, no standardised, validated instrument exists covering all aspects of integrated care. The purpose of this review is to identify the instruments concerning how to measure the level of integration across health-care sectors and to assess and evaluate the organisationa...

Due to rapid changing business requirements the complexity in developing enterprise-spanning applications is continually growing. A vital field of delivering technical concepts and technologies for integrating heterogeneous applications and components to support inter-organisational business processes is the area of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). A common characteristic of all EAI ap...