Software Partners has long recognized that small, agile web services will increasingly supplement and replace large, expensive integrated applications.  (See The Future of IIS.)

We therefore have produced web service products that can be assembled together to create a complete healthcare workflow.  As building blocks of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) for Healthcare, these web services can also be used to extend existing medical software systems such as Immunization Registries.  The first three products are directly aimed at the three most basic components of any healthcare workflow:

• Identity Resolution, traditionally known as Master Patient Index, or eMPI 
• Health Data Retrieval and Update, to create a Patient Profile or Continuity of Care Document (or Record)
• Computerized Decision Support, to complete the profile with quality measures, alerts, and so forth.

The next three Section Headings on the menu above describe those three products in more detail.  The big picture of how they fit into SOA can be visualized like this:

It is essential, when we are trying to create re-usable software components, that we define and adhere to standards, so that the separate pieces will work seamlessly with each other, and with components produced by other vendors. For this reason, we place great emphasis on published Standards, as described in more detail in the final Section in the menu above.

Standards are important in a number of aspects of software engineering and SOA, including:

• Operation Semantics - how do we identify Johnnie versus Jimmy
• Vocabulary - what do we mean by "Patient", by "Disease", by "Encounter", how do we indicate influenza versus measles  
• Interfaces - to use an electrical cord analogy, making sure the "plugs" fit the "sockets" to connect the pieces together

Examples

The Interoperability Showcase at HIMSS09 and HIMSS 10 presented an example of multiple systems working together to accomplish several tasks related to immunizations of a child over a period of time.

HIMSS 2010 Scenario.pdf
HIMSS 2009 Scenario.pdf