APPROACHING THE SOA STRATEGY

There were several different approaches for pursuing an SOA-based approach to the integration of Partners EHRs:

• Partners could create some number of enterprise services (such as allergy checking) that all legacy applications would leverage, allowing a centralized maintenance and consistency of these services.
• Applications could be developed internally using a variable mix of these enterprise services. These enterprise applications could either complement or replace existing applications and reduce the disparity of the existing EHR portfolio.
• A common, SOA-enabled, vendor-supplied EHR could replace a significant part of the existing systems. SOA would allow Partners to leverage commercial packages for basic or mature features and functions while keeping or adding differentiating features through internal development. Moreover, that mix could be managed dynamically, whereby the information systems department would replace a no-longer differentiating module with a mature commercial application and keep focusing its internal capability on truly unique development.