WS/PIDS: standard interoperable PIDS in web services environments.

An electronic health record depends on the consistent handling of people's identities within and outside healthcare organizations. Currently, the Person Identification Service (PIDS), a CORBA specification, is the only well-researched standard that meets these needs. In this paper, we introduce WS/PIDS, a PIDS specification for Web Services (WS) that closely matches the original PIDS and improves on it by providing explicit support for medical multimedia attributes. WS/PIDS is currently supported by a test implementation, layered on top of a PIDS back-end, with Java- and NET-based, and Web clients. WS/PIDS is interoperable among platforms; it preserves PIDS semantics to a large extent, and it is intended to be fully compliant with established and emerging WS standards. The specification is open source and immediately usable in dynamic clinical systems participating in grid environments. WS/PIDS has been tested successfully with a comprehensive set of use cases, and it is being used in a clinical research setting.