An application of service oriented architecture (SOA) approach

SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) is an architectural style of building applications based on composable, coarse-grained, loosely coupled autonomus software agents or components called services. A service provider system provides services containing one or more business operations, and service consumer systems communicate with the service provider by calling operations defined in the provided services. In this way, the service provider system and service consumer systems are integrated. The most important problem of the contemporary healthcare systems is integration. By integrating various healthcare systems, electronic health record belonging to an individual can be shared in a secure way. The most important organization working on solving healthcare systems? integration problems today is IHE (Integrating Healthcare Enterprise). IHE targets solving integration problems of healthcare systems by creating various healthcare integration profiles. The key objective of this thesis is to show that IHE profiles can be implemented using SOA.