The Practical Guide for SOA in Healthcare

Ken Rubin, Chief Healthcare Architect, EDS, an HP Company Civilian Government & DoD Healthcare Portfolio, presented a pre-release overview of the Practical Guide to SOA in Healthcare.

The Practical Guide to SOA in Healthcare, an output of the Healthcare Services Specification Project (HSSP), is a collaborative work of the OMG Healthcare Task Force & Health Level 7 (HL7). The goal of HSSP is to develop SOA specifications for health, specifically defining healthcare business services to enable interoperability between organizations across the health domain.

While not a standard, the practical guide provides context and guidance for healthcare IT organizations and professionals considering SOA. Using a fictitious example, the practical guide presents an 8-step process to establish a healthcare SOA, from enterprise architecture through sustainment, and includes valuable lessons learned.

During his talk, Rubin spoke of the current state of global healthcare, and anticipated changes with the new U.S. administration and Health IT programs. Walking through the practical guide, meeting attendees were keenly interested in the healthcare function to service mapping and the reference architecture. Rubin emphasized that the reference architecture is a starting point for people to think about the problem, and extend and amend for their own situations.

Throughout his presentation, Rubin took questions from attendees on SOA adoption by healthcare market segments; medical and legal implications of a services approach, such as provenance tracking; application provider appetite for SOA; credential management and the applicability of the guide and impending on standards outside of the healthcare domain.

Presentation Abstract
As a market sector, the healthcare industry is generally a market laggard, especially when considering technology adoption relating to information systems. While there is a strong appetite and interest in cutting-edge medical devices and technologies, investment in systems is viewed as an expense that takes away from the core mission. As a result, creating interest in SOA and dialogue around business transformation involving SOA is a very hard conversation to have, and healthcare vendors have been reticent to support SOA efforts.

In order to stimulate the dialogue, and ultimately the demand for SOA solutions, OMG and HL7 have authored "The Practical Guide for SOA in Healthcare." While the guide was written to a healthcare audience, the advice is equally applicable in any market segment. This is an informative document that attempts to answer the "now what?" question, capitalizing on the industry hype and name recognition that SOA brings, but casting it in an actionable approach that business leaders and their senior technology staff can use. This talk will present an overview of the "Practical Guide", talk to the business challenges that SOA can effectively address, and make the case for industry-vertical SOA standards.

About the Speaker:

Ken Rubin is the Chief Healthcare Architect, responsible for EDS, an HP Company's Civilian Government & DoD Healthcare Portfolio. Ken provides direction of strategy in the areas of health informatics and enterprise architecture. Ken is an active member of the standards community, holding positions as co-chair of the Object Management Group Healthcare Domain Task Force, the Health Level Seven (HL7) Service-Oriented Architecture Special Interest Group and the Healthcare Service Specification Project.

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