Enterprise Laboratory Service Bus; connecting old and new lab systems

To integrate old and new laboratory applications using a service-oriented architecture (SOA) one needs an infrastructure that can connect any IT resource, whatever its technology or wherever it is deployed. To be flexible, it needs an infrastructure that can easily combine and re-assemble services to meet changing requirements without disruption. And to be dependable, it needs an infrastructure that is robust and secure. NCPHI, in collaboration with CCID, has identified and approved such an infrastructure based on recognized standards which provide foundational services via an event-driven and standards-based messaging engine.  The infrastructure is called the Enterprise Laboratory Service Bus (ELSB).
With an ELSB, a heterogeneous laboratory environment can take advantage of the same services.  In other words, laboratories with various systems using various transport mediums can re-use common services.  For example, a batch file containing epidemiological, test, results and specimen data can be broken down into individual transactions with each transaction enriched with authorization and security information before subsequent routing and delivery to specialized systems offering web services

The NCPHI approach for integration through the ELSB outlines a message transport, structure, and content that will support the capacity needed for interoperability while ensuring PHIN compliance for internal CDC systems without having to duplicate development of the common infrastructure functionality. This approach includes web services for message transport, XML as the basic message structure, and takes a service based approach to message content. 

The main goal of the proposed ELSB is to provide abstraction of the underlying services by provision of a single mechanism for integration. The ELSB will provide a set of CDC enterprise laboratory services to internal and external clients via industry-standard interfaces for interoperability.