Middleware has great potential for mitigating healthcare IT interoperability issues. However, because it mediates network services to applications, middleware can also create major security issues—possibly enough to offset any benefits.
A need for healthcare providers to have easy access to patient data fueled the push for the widespread adoption of electronic health records (EHR) systems. In the days of paper records, patients would often show up at doctors’ offices or, worse yet, hospital emergency rooms with no paper trail; if they had never been to that facility before, their medical records were not available, leaving their new providers scrambling to treat them with an incomplete or non-existent medical history.
