For some time, service-oriented architecture (SOA) was a hot buzzword in IT as organizations looked to improve reuse and drop overall maintenance costs for their platforms. After an initial honeymoon period, however, SOA took a beating. Some recently went as far as calling SOA dead, especially after initial implementations highlighted struggles around service level management and performance.
With this backlash against SOA, why should service-oriented architecture matter in healthcare today?
The case for SOA can be summarized in three quick points:
- First, a vendor with SOA experience has the expertise and know-how to deploy a reliable, responsive SOA implementation. Performance issues have been, and can be, addressed.
- Second, healthcare IT needs are growing exponentially, with delivery dates accelerated by meaningful use targets. SOA-based solutions are characterized by quick delivery and the ability to grow at the pace the market has set.
- Third, and perhaps most importantly, SOA is vital to bringing partners on board to deliver the robust and varied solutions required by today’s healthcare organizations.
Hospital and health information exchange (HIE) administrators have spent the majority of 2009 doing their homework to limit the number of potential missteps when executing their IT strategy – particularly as the HIE market grows. Meaningful use targets for 2011, 2013 and 2015 are a common constraint that exists across all these initiatives, and the byproduct of this constraint is the need to partner to meet delivery needs, though many organizations in the past were averse to such an arrangement. These savvy administrators recognize that the days of using one technology or vendor to satisfy their IT goals are over, that cooperation is required, and that the support of educated, experienced partners is a must.
The fact is that healthcare IT organizations will only meet their goals and timelines if they are prepared to open their platform and invite partners and integrators to extend their capabilities to help deliver a winning, meaningful health information exchange. A quick caveat, however. It’s one thing to say, “We’ll just open up our platform,” but it’s critical to remember that a thoughtful architecture is required to best support third-party developers, integrators, and internal staff.
Healthcare IT vendors’ strategy used to be simple: focus on the physician and everything else falls into place. While the importance of focusing on physicians is still uncontested, a new group of customers, which I call Delivery Partners, has emerged. Sharing data with these partners – including internal IT staff, informatics specialists, clinical transition specialists, and even third-party developers and system integrators – adds a layer of complexity that wasn’t present a few years ago. Sharing data across an HIE requires advanced cross-system and cross-organization interoperability that the standard IT implementation doesn’t support.
Organizations that invested ahead of the curve on SOA initiatives, with the vision of structuring their software to allow others to safely extend it, stand the best chance of opening their platforms and quickly bringing developer frameworks to market that invite partner collaboration to serve mutual customers.
The most successful, on-time implementations over the next five years will be those built on a solid foundation of SOA technologies with the proper partnerships in place to safely install, extend and support the solution. The market needs such an approach now, and those who have already established this style of architecture – paired with a solid understanding of care coordination workflows – will lead the charge in meeting the demands of the market.
