Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) for Public Health: Public Health and Clinical Perspectives

On February 17, 2009, President Obama signed into law the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). Title XIII of the Act provides funding and incentives for the development, implementation, and improvement of health information technology (HIT). The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Coordinated Federal Health Information Technology Plan for 2008-2012 calls for developing a Nationwide Health Information Network of regional electronic health information exchanges connecting interoperable Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems deployed in clinical practice. Various public health (PH) information systems have to be integrated with EHR-based clinical systems into interoperable EHR-PH systems to support electronic health information exchanges between clinical care and public health. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) offers an approach of designing and developing interoperable systems by utilizing shared services.  These include repository services, registry services, decision support services, identity services, security services, etc. SOA is built upon the user requirements for information system design (functional requirements) that describe the problem that the information system will help to solve; the goal of the information system; participants in the information exchange (actors) and their functions (actions); data sources involved in the information exchanges; and a particular information exchange scenario (use case) that describes workflow of stakeholders and dataflow that the information system will have to support. The functional requirements will help developers to select SOA services needed to build the information system as well as particular standards that will be used by these services. Reuse of common services by different clinical and public health information systems will enable interoperability across these systems.