Int. J. Internet Protocol Technology, Vol. 7, No. 4, 2013 189 Copyright © 2013 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. A federated interoperability architecture for health information systems Mario Ciampi*, Giuseppe De Pietro, Christian Esposito and Mario Sicuranza Institute for High Performance Computing and Networking (ICAR), National Research Council of Italy (CNR), Via Pietro Castellino, 111 – 80131 Napoli, Italy E-mail: mario.ciampi@na.icar.cnr.it E-mail: giuseppe.depietro@na.icar.cnr.it E-mail: christian.esposito@na.icar.cnr.it E-mail: mario.sicuranza@na.icar.cnr.it *Corresponding author Paolo Donzelli Department for the Digitization of Public Administration and Technological Innovation (DDI), Presidency of the Council of Ministers, Via Po, 14 – 00198 Roma, Italy E-mail: p.donzelli@governo.it Abstract: The last decade has been characterised by the proliferation of several projects for integrating the already-existing health information systems so as to form national or transnational infrastructures for sharing medical data. This evolution is felt as a promising solution for improving the provided healthcare and reducing its costs by avoiding unnecessary examinations. However, such a vision comes with several challenging issues, in terms of interoperability and security. This paper presents an architecture for federating health information systems in a secure manner, and its concrete implementation. The quality of this implementation is assessed by means of several experiments for measuring the time needed for the retrieval and notification of documents. Keywords: health information systems; interoperability; data sharing; web services; event notification. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Ciampi, M., De Pietro, G., Esposito, C., Sicuranza, M. and Donzelli, P. (2013) ‘A federated interoperability architecture for health information systems’, Int. J. Internet Protocol Technology, Vol. 7, No. 4, pp.189–202. Biographical notes: Mario Ciampi is a Technologist at the Institute for High Performance Computing and Networking of the Italian National Research Council (ICAR-CNR). He received his MEng in Computer Engineering from the University of Naples Federico II in 2004, and Masters degree in European Master on Critical Networked Systems in 2007. He received his PhD in Information Engineering in 2011 from the University of Naples Parthenope. His topics of interest focus on interoperability architectures for e-health. He is an Adjunct Professor in Elements of Computer Science at the University of Naples Federico I and a member of iHealthlab, AMICO, HL7 Italia, and @ITIM. Giuseppe De Pietro is a Senior Researcher and Coordinator at the Naples branch of the Institute for High-Performance Computing and Networking (ICAR) of Italian National Research Council (CNR). His current research interests are: middleware architecture for pervasive computing, decision support systems, and software architectures for e-health. He has been actively involved in many European and national projects, with industrial cooperation too. He is a contract Professor of Information Systems at the University of Naples ‘Parthenope’. He is the author of over 100 scientific papers published in international journals and conferences. He is a contract Professor of Computer Science at University of Naples ‘Parthenope’ and an IEEE member.