Integration of information systems: assessing its quality

Due to organizational and technological changes the need for integrating information systems within healthcare institutions, has increased enormously. Although the technical means for systems integration have definitely matured, integration methodologies are still in their infancy. Two important questions regarding systems integration are hardly ever addressed in a systematic way: how to derive integration requirements, and how to check whether the requirements are met in a given integrated system. These two questions must be answered if we want to assess or improve the quality of integration of a given set of systems. In this article we present a nine-step method for deriving integration requirements from a business process model, and we assess the quality of integration of a given integrated system against these requirements. The method is demonstrated by elaborating two case studies from the health care domain.