Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) for Public Health: Health Information Technology Industry Perspectives

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is increasingly receiving attention as an approach of interest and potential viability to improve healthcare delivery, business-IT alignment, and health IT efficacy. Especially in public health, SOA offers tremendous promise, as it provides a natural means to coordinate and align among disparate systems and locations in a consistent way while allowing participating organizations to have different underpinning systems and approaches.

 

While SOA has been proven in many market sectors, it is only now coming into the spotlight within healthcare in general and public health in particular. This presentation will explore the impacts of SOA in a public health environment, considering factors such as public policy, underlying technology, enterprise architecture, and functional design. It will also discuss the importance of healthcare vertical industry standards to help align and coordinate among SOA implementations.

 

The presentation is based upon the work chartered in the Healthcare Services Specification Project, a joint collaborative activity involving multiple standards development bodies including Health Level Seven (HL7), the Object Management Group (OMG), and IHE (Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise), and reflects best-practices as contributed by active participants in this space. This presentation will explore an approach for conducting business analysis, architectural mapping, services-discovery, and ultimately the benefits of a SOA as applied to public health to aid in the discovery of and aggregation of distributed data, consistency in information access, and integration across multiple information locations and sources.