Bio-wise and otherwise

It's SOA Cool!

In case y'all haven't seen it yet, check out this link:

http://soa.sys-con.com

It clearly belongs to the 'trail-blazer' class of links. 

Congrats to Sun's App Server and Portal Server for having made the Reader's Choice award!

On the healthcare front, an interesting case study on Medicalert demonstrates how SOA architecture enables business agility and increases value of IT. Medicalert is a non-profit organization which is better known for its bracelets which, when worn by patients, alert doctors about conditions like allergy during crucial times like an emergency operation. 

Today, Medicalert has also ably adopted healthcare information services.

The MedicAlert repository relies on Web Service interfaces to support standard Personal Health Records (PHR), including electronic drug prescriptions and for patient record interoperability. The repository of personal health information facilitates the delivery of critical medical information between patients, providers, payers, and emergency responders around the clock and across the world.

While personal medical records are updated by members in a secure and private environment, the growing integration between departments and hospital personnel has necessitated more interoperability among systems. This would also entail getting data from partners and updating existing medical records. This means building more web services into the main system.

Such a scalable system has to also be able to wrap custom policies around the services that are produced. Medicalert's new policy engine allows for executing different policies to accomplish a vast array of tasks in a scalable and secure way.

SOA in healthcare is very important to ensure business agility and scalability. Particularly because there can be many applications that need to be interoperable in a unique governance model and also a secure environment. The user must get an integrated view of all these systems, and data needs to be retrieved at the click of a button.

With each new requirement in the healthcare front, small wonder then that the IT gurus are finding more and more reasons to sing  the SOA-ng.

Posted at 09:43AM Jul 08, 2007 by Manju in Sun  |  Comments[0]