SOA in Healthcare Conference June 2-4 in Chicago

The general hype of Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) has calmed down quite a bit which means that practicality and reality is settling in for the design pattern. With concepts like Web Oriented Architecture (WOA) and Resource Oriented Architecture (ROA) getting more attention these days and the “Death of SOA” being pronounced by the likes of Burton Group, it’s clear that the pundits need something new to talk about.

My feeling is that SOA as a way of defining reusable and portable services for creating composite application as opposed to siloed code components and applications acting independently is still very meaningful and applicable. Whether we want WOA, ROA, SOA, mashups, SaaS, Cloud Computing, etc we still need the basic governance, enterprise architecture, and data-orientation that SOA espouses.

There is a good deal of disillusionment related to SOA but that’s because SOA was touted to be the savior of IT. There will be no single savior of IT just like there’s no single savior for any complex business or social problem. However, moving to data-oriented and service-oriented architecture in healthcare remain laudable aspirations and design patterns.

Ken Rubin, Chairman of the Object Management Group’s (OMG) SOA in Healthcare Conference, invited me to participate in a panel at the Chicago event in early June. He and I chatted about the need for service-orientation in healthcare and both of us concurred that the need is stronger than ever, especially in the light of the stimulus bill’s HITECH act and the money that’s being pumped into healthcare IT over the next 5 years. If we take that money and stuff it into EMRs and applications alone we’ll have squandered a great opportunity.

I wanted to thank Ken for his invitation and think that anyone that’s serious about healthcare services and IT should consider attending the conference. The program is outstanding because it’s bringing together people who know what they’re doing and those who have actually made service orientation in healthcare a reality. Here’s a sample of the kinds of sessions you’ll be able to attend:

• Who Defines the ‘Service’ in SOA
• An Evolutionary Approach to SOA in Healthcare Enterprises
• The Role of SOA in  Business-IT Alignment Cross-Enterprise Interoperability
• Federal NHIN Connect Overview
• SOA in an Electronic Health Record Product Line
• Fostering Health IT transformation and SOA’s Role: A Government and International Perspective
• The HL7 Services-Aware EA Framework (SAEAF): Introduction, Overview, and Governance
• The Business Side of SOA
• Integrating Patient Information with SOA
• Integrated Requirements Design: a Proven Methodology for Architecting Service-Oriented Solutions
• Myths vs. Reality: The Role of Open Source in Commercial, Production, and High Quality Healthcare Systems
• The Perfect Storm – How Do Policy, Public Sector, Private Investment, and SOA Align?
• The Business Case for SOA and the Critical Role of Architecture in the Interoperability Challenge
• SOA Enablement and Adoption Strategy for the Healthcare Enterprise (Workshop)
• The Importance of SOA in a Large Cancer Center IT Environment
• SOA for Healthcare – The Promise and Pitfalls
• Lessons-Learned on Implementing a SOA at VA
• Continua Health Alliance: Personal Telehealth
• Practical Experience in Deploying a SOA Base Product for Hospital Patient Quality of Care Improvement
• HL7 System Design Reference Model (EHR-SD RM) Built on Healthcare SOA Reference Architecture
• Integrating Communities of Practices for Collective Healthcare Intelligence
• Unlocking Clinical Information Assets: a Service-oriented Approach to Integration
• The Challenges of Designing Terminology Services in an Application Oriented Enterprise
• The HL7 Service-Aware EA Framework (SAEAF): Behavioral Framework
• Putting Standards Into Practice: Lessons Learned While Introducing SOA Into IHE
• Federated Software Architecture for the Federated Utah Research &  Translational Health e-Repository
• Panel Discussion: How Do Organizations Realize Business Value from Enterprise Architecture and SOA Investments?
• Architecting Data Standards to Enable Service Interoperability
• Singapore’s National E-Health Records – an Enterprise Architecture Approach
• Healthcare SOA: From Requirements to Deployment; An Example
• How to Implement Successful SOA in Healthcare: University of Chicago Medical Center Case Study