![]() Given the recent challenges of Lehman, Merrill, AIG, Washington Mutual, and others, you wonder just how effective the IT systems of these companies have been. "Stop loss" insurance on mortgage backed securities Today's Boston Globe nicely summarizes the financial issues at the core of the crisisĢ. Since 1998, I've often been told that Healthcare IT needs to take a lesson from the financial folks about doing IT right. When a healthcare stakeholder asks questions such as "I need to exchange medication lists, discharge summaries, personal health records, glucometer data and quality data" the answer will be - HITSP has a well defined service component for that!ĭuring the decade I've been CIO, IT operating budgets have been 2% of my organization's total budget, which is typical for the healthcare industry.ĭuring the same period, IT budgets for the financial services industry have averaged 10% or higher. You'll hear much more about this effort over the next several months. * Rationalizing the reuse and repurposing of HITSP interoperability specifications and their components ![]() * Aligning HITSP work with industry trends including the Federal Health Architecture and IHE efforts * Providing CCHIT with the necessary standards and framework for certifying Health Information Exchange * Incorporating the lessons learned from the recent Nationwide Health Information Network demonstration It also helps all the other national healthcare IT stakeholders by: Is that it provides strategic position for HITSP within national initiatives as the coordinator and harmonizer of SOA for healthcare. The HITSP Board voted to establish a working group which will deliver a plan within 90 days to wrap all HITSP work so that it will plug and play with a service oriented architecture. Although HITSP has developed specifications for transmission of data, it has not specified a common "envelope" for routing and delivery of healthcare information, leaving that to individual implementers. ![]() To date, HITSP interoperability specifications have focused on the contents of the medical record and vocabularies, not the transaction rules among participating systems needing to exchange data. * Service discoverability – Services are designed to be outwardly descriptive so that they can be found and assessed via available discovery mechanisms * Service autonomy – Services have control over the logic they encapsulate * Service composability - Collections of services can be coordinated and assembled to form composite services * Service reusability - Logic is divided into services with the intention of promoting reuse * Service abstraction - Beyond what is described in the service contract, services hide logic from the outside world * Service "contract" - Services adhere to a communications agreement, as defined collectively by one or more service description documents ![]() SOA exchanges typically do not require complex technical rules for interactions between senders and receivers. The joy of a service oriented architecture is that it is loosely coupled - each participant does not need to understand the internal applications of trading partners. We reviewed a proposal, to be widely circulated among all stakeholders, which envisions a future for HITSP as the champion of " service oriented architecture (SOA)" for healthcare.īefore you declare that SOA is just another fad at the peak of the Gartner hype curve, realize that SOA is not about a specific technique such as web services, but about a way of connecting organizations using a set of principles that adapts easily to changes in technology. It's rare for me to personally champion an idea, but today's HITSP Board meeting has given me a cause to celebrate. As chair of HITSP, I am a non-voting facilitator who supports all stakeholders equally - large/small, open source/commercial, payers/providers.
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