Earlier this week, while I had my head in the clouds, my colleagues at the SOA Consortium released another podcast from our Santa Clara meeting. This one features Ken Rubin, Chief Healthcare Architect, EDS Federal Healthcare Portfolio, presenting a pre-release overview of the Practical Guide to SOA in Healthcare.
I had an opportunity to participate in the review of this document, so I was excited to book Ken at our meeting. No surprise, my favorite parts of the document and the presentation are the healthcare specific artifacts and anecdotes. Glancing below, you'll see the reference architecture, which is actually quite detailed. To drill in, download the Practical Guide document. And of course, check out the podcast. What follows is swiped from my post on SOA Consortium Insights:
The Practical Guide to SOA in Healthcare, an output of the Healthcare Services Specification Project (HSSP), is a collaborative work of the OMG Healthcare Task Force & Health Level 7 (HL7). The goal of HSSP is to develop SOA specifications for health, specifically defining healthcare business services to enable interoperability between organizations across the health domain.
While not a standard, the practical guide provides context and guidance for healthcare IT organizations and professionals considering SOA. Using a fictitious example, the practical guide presents an 8-step process to establish a healthcare SOA, from enterprise architecture through sustainment, and includes valuable lessons learned.
During his talk, Rubin spoke of the current state of global healthcare, and anticipated changes with the new U.S. administration and Health IT programs. Walking through the practical guide, meeting attendees were keenly interested in the healthcare function to service mapping and the reference architecture. Rubin emphasized that the reference architecture is a starting point for people to think about the problem, and extend and amend for their own situations.
Throughout his presentation, Rubin took questions from attendees on SOA adoption by healthcare market segments, medical and legal implications of a services approach, such as provenance tracking, application provider appetite for SOA, credential management and the applicability of the guide and impending on standards outside of the healthcare domain.
To listen to an audio recording of Ken Rubin’s presentation and view the slides go here. For more information on the Practical Guide for SOA in Healthcare initiative, and to download version one of the guide, please go here.
[Disclosure: The SOA Consortium is a client of my company, Elemental Links.]
Whom should be working on writing the Practical Guide to SOA in Insurance?
Posted by: James | February 21, 2009 at 07:13 AM
Good question. ACORD and its members? Perhaps partnered with a standards body with SOA interests?
Posted by: brenda | February 21, 2009 at 09:58 AM