Health Services

Computerworld - Hospital IT infrastructures form a complex transactional environment in which pulling applications and information together can be not just mission-critical, but also a matter of life and death.
Entrenched proprietary systems store patients' clinical, radiological, demographic and billing information as text, images and voice-annotated reports. That information must be dealt with in accordance with strict clinical priorities and federal regulations. An increasing number of health care organizations are using Web services and service-oriented architectures to make critical connections in their information systems.
"We are building SOAs and Web services that will not only integrate different systems, but also take care of the hospital's rules -- a heart operation cannot be performed on the second floor, or anesthesia equipment cannot be located in the cafeteria, for example," says Furrukh Khan, director of the Collaborative for Applied Software Technology at Ohio State University Medical Center in Columbus.
Khan and his staff have developed a Microsoft .Net-based SOA that includes Web services for connecting hospital monitoring equipment to back-end databases. Since .Net licenses were already in place, the Web services were developed for very little cost, Khan explains.
Using Microsoft Indigo and Microsoft Web Services Enhancements for .Net, which provide standards-based security and other features to the Visual Studio .Net and .Net frameworks, Khan and his staff have linked anesthesia systems with the hospital's location services, which are stored in a McKesson Corp. hospital information system. As a result, physicians and other authorized users can view a patient's picture and vital signs remotely on a Web browser, says Khan.
Without Web services, the task of integrating patient data in the clinical and departmental systems scattered throughout hospital facilities has been monumental, say hospital CIOs.
"I have clinical software from 17 vendors. All you're really trying to do is service the organization and doctors, but it's a terrible struggle to get information between the different electronic environments," says John Wade, vice president and CIO at Saint Luke's Health System Inc. in Kansas City, Mo.
Saint Luke's uses systems from multiple hospital software vendors, and even with in-house programming staff and funds at his disposal for integration projects, Wade says it's still very difficult to get information from one electronic environment to another.
For example, the hospital has developed a custom XML-based application for its Web portal. Called Post-It Note, the application translates Dictaphone voice into data to allow physicians to view and annotate a radiologist's voice-based report on a Web browser. The patient data resides in a system from San Francisco-based McKesson. The use