Overview of service oriented architecture: definition, use in healthcare management, challenges and ethics

Abstract

Objective: To provide an overview of use of service oriented architecture in Healthcare with focus on the pros and cons of its use as well as the challenges involved in its implementation.

Data Sources: The subject was broken down to specific areas of concern and literature search and enquiries done in a focused manner.

Data Extraction: Extensive literature provided ability to extract data related to architectural approaches, technologies adapted the required healthcare standards and challenges and potential solutions.

Data Synthesis: Extracted data were grouped into topics such as SOA use in Healthcare management, Ethical issues, Benefits, and Challenges. The benefits were found to outweigh the challenges. Potential service discovery was noted as fairly complicated, by the fact that organisations may have huge amounts of biomedical data which may be regarded as vast internet-accessible subroutine library, when deciding whether a service is appropriate for a specific task. This would require expert human intervention.

Conclusion: Service-oriented architecture can be described as an open agile, extensible, federated composite architecture comprised of autonomous, Quality of Service (QoS)- capable, vendor diverse, inter-operable, discoverable and potentially re-usable services, implemented as web services. Health data being sensitive, it is important to carry out extensive research on its security, particularly on storage of non-encrypted data in cloud, and security of access.