An Initial Investigation of Web Services in Healthcare

The architectural landscape of healthcare information systems is extremely diverse representing a collection of many different hardware and operating platforms as well as applications developed in a multitude of development environments and programming languages. The real struggle in healthcare information technology is the need to find means to expand the effective use of these existing systems while at the same time increasing their functional capabilities. One answer to this dilemma is the Web Services model. Web services are application modules that provide the underlying technologies necessary to exchange data and other services between applications residing on the Internet. Standards used to support the Web services model include the XML based specifications of UDDI for discovery of Web services, WSDL for describing Web services and SOAP for transporting messages and exchanging data. Given all the interest in this technology and the projected benefits Web services will bring to healthcare technology, it would be expected that healthcare organizations are embracing the Web services model. The purpose of this research project is to assess what is happening in the healthcare arena in relation to Web services. The first part of this project, which is presented in this paper, is to investigate the availability of published healthcare related Web services. The next phase of the research will be to identify specific healthcare organizations that are developing Web services and assessing how those Web services are being implemented.