Service Oriented Healthcare Systems

Here's an interesting post on Service Oriented Architecture:

Book: the business of SOA is… business by ZDNet's Joe McKendrick -- Now, an SOA book for the rest of the business.

As a long-time enterprise architect, I really appreciated this quote:

I'm not quite sure what "doom" awaits by not service orienting, other than remaining mired in archiac, calcified and siloed processes — which a lot of businesses do anyway, and still manage to stay afloat. But that's the topic for another posting.

Why does that remind me of healthcare IT applications? Or, more to the point, what is the risk to healthcare service delivery of having critical business processes just "manage to stay afloat?"

Now, a good architect is taught never to confuse meaning with metaphor. However, let's look at the usefulness of mapping IT processes (web services) to healthcare business processes (delivery services) when you develop healthcare IT systems. Here's are three basic tenets of service-oriented architecture development that healthcare business processes share:

• Services are loosely coupled
• Focus is on the public results of the processes - the information they produce - instead of the private methods the processes employ
• Individual processes can be re-applied for multiple purposes

If you're a clinician, think of services such as "lab services for reporting blood work." If you're a techie, think of services such as "web services for reporting lab results in a networked environment." In either case, think of recasting healthcare business processes in a different light to come up with best methods for effective healthcare service delivery with multiple partners, providers, and consumers thrown into the mix.

That's the art and science of Business Process Management, and establishing a Service Oriented Architecture for the supporting IT systems is an important strategy to consider when you apply that craft.