Service Oriented Architecture in Healthcare
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Escalating costs of medical care, pharmaceuticals, and medical equipment continue to be one of the most significant causes for concern in the healthcare industry. Lack of integration among legacy healthcare systems and applications means a continued reliance on manual processes that can introduce high risk errors into critical medical data. Poor integration with pharmaceutical suppliers impacts both patient care and the business bottom line. And isolated systems can compromise a provider’s ability to follow an individual patient’s care seamlessly from intake to treatment to aftercare.
While healthcare providers recognize that integration can help them achieve better service levels, many have been reluctant to proceed because of the critical nature of healthcare systems. But the approach to integration need not be a radical one of system rip and replace, nor does it have to proceed through the development of system by system integration solutions. Instead, what is needed is an approach to integration that leverages existing IT investments, is standardized in its approach, and is flexible enough to keep up with the changing needs of the healthcare industry.
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an approach to integrating IT resources that can enable you to leverage existing assets, while at the same time building an infrastructure that can rapidly respond to new organizational challenges and deliver new dynamic applications. The SOA approach can help free application functionality from its underlying IT architecture, and make existing and new services available for consumption over the network.
Microsoft has developed the Connected Health Framework Architecture and Design Blueprint based on industry best practices and has a comprehensive SOA offering that
| • | Provides developers, architects and IT professionals with the tools, technologies, framework and guidance for building and maintaining SOA solutions. |
| • | Provides business users with personal productivity software that can help your organization increase productivity, lower costs, and promote organizational agility by streamlining and optimizing business processes. |
Case Studies
For information on how the Microsoft SOA vision and technologies can help you integrate IT resources and business processes to achieve a more agile enterprise, refer to the following case studies.
