The utilization of IT in support of all the activities of business is "Electronic Business," commonly referred to as "eBusiness" or "e- Business". A subset of an overall ebusiness strategy is "e-commerce", which seeks to add revenue streams through the Internet to build and enhance relationships with clients and partners and to improve efficiency. It uses an Empty Vessel strategy, that is, the approach of a lack of leadership and unwillingness of the members to take individual responsibility. On the other hand, e-commerce involves the application of knowledge management systems.
The applications of e-commerce to healthcare have resulted in using the availability of low-cost, high-speed Internet-related or wireless technology, revolutionizing the healthcare business. Consequently, e-healthcare has increased health awareness, improved decision-making effectiveness, cultivated more positive consumer- provider relationships, and enhanced healthcare data systems and decision support implementations.
In a world with a Ubiquitous Healthcare Information Service, people are in a seamlessly interweaving computing environment and surrounded by computing devices and a computing infrastructure that supports them in everything they do. And so they consult virtual physicians and get Anytime, Anywhere and Always On healthcare, which is the so-called ubiquitous healthcare service.
Behind the scene of the ubiquitous healthcare service, there are a group of non-stop servers, which are not unique in the ubiquitous experience. But the requirements of the ubiquitous healthcare servers are much different from others'.
This is due to the peculiarities of the data transferred to the servers. The data is ubiquitous patients' physiological status or vital signs at the moment. If a data storage failure occurred, it would be impossible to acquire the same data again. And because frequent analog-to-digital conversions and operations happen, the data has to be kept consistent even in case of system failure; otherwise the data will be of no use. In addition, there are cases where it is impossible to separate the data into a traditional transaction unit. So the data has to be treated in a coherent and reliable way, independent of other transactions, on ubiquitous healthcare servers.
From the legal viewpoint, the data has to be protected against misuse, abuse and theft. So the ubiquitous healthcare servers have to be safer and more secure.
And for the purpose of medical decision-making, the data has to be gathered in temporal sequence for hours and successfully written to durable storage. And moreover, the data has to be integrated into Electronic Medical Records or Hospital Information Systems to examine patients precisely.
To realize the above-mentioned requirements, the following functions or features need to be satisfied in advance. First, the hardware components, which consist of CPUs, memory, disks, network cards, power supplies, and cooling fans; and the software components, for instance, operating systems, databases, and applications; have to have 24 hour fault tolerance.
Second, the middleware, connecting software components, for the ubiquitous healthcare service has to have fault-tolerant properties - that is, load balancing, durability, stability, isolation and recovery mechanisms - to maintain stable operations even under heavy traffic on the servers.
Third, the applications in the servers have to frequently do analogto- digital conversions on a huge scale, completely analyze the data from the patients and perfectly diagnose their conditions.
