Service-oriented architecture: Effective care in a new healthcare economy
Published: April 17, 2006
Ask 10 people how the healthcare industry is changing, and you are likely to hear 10 different answers. Rigorous new privacy standards, electronic medical records, widespread mergers and acquisitions, and emerging medical technologies are just a few of the many factors contributing to rapid changes in the structure and delivery of healthcare in the United States. Of these changes, perhaps none is more significant than the rising cost of care, and the resulting efforts to shift more responsibility for these costs to the patient.
Now, regardless of by choice or by necessity, patients have become consumers of healthcare, assuming more responsibility for selecting healthcare plans, shopping competitively for medical services, and proactively managing their wellness.
“This new collaborative model requires health plans to establish new and more customer-centric business processes,” says Dennis Schmuland MD FAAFP, director of Health Plan Industry Management at Microsoft. “Instead of relying on telephone interactions or the conventional self-service Web sites of today, for example, health plans must employ more robust technologies—everything from single sign-on Web portals to mobile devices and instant messaging—to better serve their customers.”
Microsoft is helping health plans meet the demands of the new health care economy and deliver better care at a competitive price with technologies that promote a more flexible, service-oriented organization.
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New expectations drive new business requirements
Providing excellent customer service in the complex arena of healthcare requires much more than a customer is always right attitude.
"To remain competitive in this new consumer-driven healthcare economy," says Hector Rodriguez, Health Plan Industry Technology Strategist at Microsoft, "health plans must enable better information exchange with critical partners and provide better tools to help members manage their health."
Rodriguez cites one example—the business requirements for setting up and managing a health savings account. "You have to integrate a number of key constituents that provide different capabilities to make the process easy on the consumer," Rodriguez notes. More specifically, information from the financial services organization must be integrated with the health plan provider. Claims information must be available to the physician. And all this information must be pushed to consumers in an easy-to-use portal where they can monitor their financial accounts, submit claims, and more."
The standard point-to-point solutions that health plans have relied on in the past simply can't provide the kind of business agility and efficient cross enterprise integration now required to support a robust customer service model. "To achieve these goals," Rodriguez notes, "plans must have a usable architectural framework. One that enables all the participants in the healthcare ecosystem—from the patient to the health plan to the family practitioner and the financial manager—to interact in a timely and cost-effective manner.
Forward-thinking organizations are turning to a service-oriented architecture to meet the complex business requirements of the new healthcare economy.
Flexible architecture for business agility
Specifically designed for flexibility and reuse, a service-oriented architecture (SOA) enables organizations to easily integrate systems, data, applications, and processes through the linking of services. An SOA enables uncomplicated connectivity by abstracting dependencies away from each application into a Web service (or other brokering service). Applications can then easily be connected to the broker through modular components. And each application can be modified whenever necessary to support flexible and dynamic business processes through platform-independent, standardized interfaces.
Forrester Research analysts Ken Vollmer and Mike Gilpin report that this approach could reduce application development and maintenance costs by 30 percent or more, says Rodriguez . 1 "Ultimately, an SOA provides a much more agile environment for process orchestration, for integration across applications, and for collaboration between users.” And that business agility is easily within reach for organizations that migrate to a service-oriented architecture built on industry-standard Microsoft technologies."
Because of its commitment to open standards and security-enhanced data, Microsoft has established itself as a leader in meeting the requirements of the healthcare and life sciences industry. And healthcare innovators such as Horizon Healthcare are responding by deploying the infrastructure to build out SOA solutions as part of their business strategy.
An SOA built on Microsoft technologies includes:
| • | Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 and 2004 enable decoupled integration with a wide range of systems and deliver full support for business processes and activity monitoring. |
| • | Microsoft .NET-connected solutions enable businesses to build, deploy, operate, and integrate XML Web services, a critical component of a SOA. |
| • | Windows Communication Foundation provides the framework for building, configuring, and deploying network-distributed services and interoperable service-oriented applications that enable cross-platform interoperability and integration. |
| • | Windows Server System integrated server software supports the applications and technology components required to build an enterprise SOA. |
In addition to being highly scalable and security enhanced, an SOA built on Microsoft technologies enables compliance with industry wide standards such as the Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC), Health Level 7 (HL7), and the Healthcare Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
Microsoft technologies enable change
The pace of change in health care is only going to increase as the market responds to pressures to realize greater efficiencies, lower costs, and improve outcomes. Implementation of an SOA based on Microsoft technologies provides the platform for building more efficient processes and sharing information in a security-enhanced, targeted way.
"We keep hearing the need for a usable and reusable architecture to enable all the participants in the healthcare ecosystem to interact and to economically embrace new challenges with speed, flexibility, and agility while enhancing the consumer's experience," says Rodriguez.
"An SOA built on Microsoft technologies is just that," Rodriguez continues. "It is interoperable. It is highly reusable. There is a low cost of entry and a lower total cost of ownership. And it drives more loosely coupled connectivity and accessibility to provide a much more agile environment for process orchestration, integration, and collaboration across the users of information."
For insurers, this means lower costs and better services. And for consumers, collaboration and integration of information might turn out to be key factors in achieving better healthcare and better health.
