Abstract
The era of big data is surrounded by plenty of challenges, concerning aspects related with data quality, data management, or data analysis. Plenty of these challenges are met in several domains, such as the healthcare domain, where the corresponding healthcare platforms not only have to deal with managing and/or analyzing a tremendous quantity of health data, but also have to accomplish these actions in the most efficient and secure way possible. Towards this direction, medical institutions are paying attention to the replacement of traditional approaches such as the Monolithic and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) that deal with many difficulties for handling the increasing amount of healthcare data. This paper presents a platform for overcoming these issues, by adopting the Microservice Architecture (MSA), being able to efficiently manage and analyze these vast amounts of data. More specifically, the proposed platform, namely beHEALTHIER, offers the ability to construct health policies out of data of collective knowledge, by utilizing a newly proposed kind of electronic health records (i.e., eXtended Health Records (XHRs)) and their corresponding networks, through the efficient analysis and management of the ingested data. In order to achieve that, beHEALTHIER is architected based upon four (4) discrete and interacting pillars, namely the Data, the Information, the Knowledge and the Actions. Since the proposed platform is based on MSA, it fully utilizes MSA’s benefits, achieving fast response times and effective mechanisms for healthcare data collection, processing, and analysis