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At Your Service: Service Oriented Architecture Brings Needed Order to the Complex Health Care Technology Environment
In the next five years, most leading health care organizations will begin adopting Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Pressure from stakeholders, the competition, and customer demands that IT departments implement high ROI, low cost solutions that are quick to deploy, scalable, and respond quickly to market conditions.
The current health care technology environment is filled with monolithic, proprietary applications with point-to-point interfaces. This makes adding new features and applications extremely difficult and time-consuming. IT departments that have become savvier with their budget are opting for SOA in the form of web services that reduce the risk to the company’s mission critical processes and allow for measurable business benefit to the bottom line. A well-managed SOA strategy reduces the complexity of an organization’s applications and creates an IT infrastructure that reduces development time and cost. SOA initiatives leverage previous IT investments through reuse; it encourages interoperability through the promotion of standards; it reduces risk to key business processes because it can be implemented incrementally with modular web services.
Like any new technology there will be an upfront investment in retooling existing methodologies and retraining staff. However, SOA does not carry the heavy overhead and infrastructure burden of past middleware-driven architectures. Health care organizations wishing to adopt an SOA need a plan and a roadmap. Once an SOA framework has been developed migration is usually evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Software vendors should be considered based on their own adherence to SOA standards. The payoff is that health care organizations that implement SOA will be able to reduce their cost of operations while more rapidly adapting to the changing health care business environment.
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