Towards designing a federated database framework for disease outbreak notification systems

Nowadays, the volume of healthcare data that is increasing exponentially, is stored in geographically distributed databases. Current solutions allow healthcare practitioners, epidemiologists and researchers to collect and analyze critical information from these databases by accessing multiple data sources to make critical decisions related to their work. However, this can be a time-consuming and error-prone process. Providing a uniform and logical unit to obtain data is not an easy task and needs clean data integration process. Among the data integration approaches, Federated Databases andWeb Services are the recent approaches that minimize the interference of current operations, handle the heterogeneities, and maintain the local autonomy of component systems. In this paper, we propose a design for a federated databases framework to handle the operations of outbreak notification systems based on a cloud environment with a utilization of Web services approach.