SOA in Action Blog

In a new ebizQ Webinar, Jorge Mercado, lead architect of the software architecture group for the MedicAlert Foundation, talked about the challenges and benefits behind his organization’s successful SOA deployment. (Available here from ebizQ.)

MedicAlert, which currently has 30 services in production, embarked on the SOA path for two reasons, Mercado explained. First, the organization sought to achieve interoperability not only between its own internal applications, but with partners as well. MedicAlert’s mission is to provide up-to-date personal health records to hospitals, doctors’ offices, EMTs, and other medical professionals and establishments. Second, MedicAlert sought more agility in its business, which could be achieved through the faster turnaround of new applications.

The system, called E-HealthKEY, is intended to provide the foundation’s partners more seamless access to pertinent medical information. “The level of interoperability that is provided by implementing an SOA is really what we’re after,” he said. “Keeping information in our repository and our repository alone is a good thing, but that’s not where we want to be in the future. We want to be able to share information with hospitals, doctor’s offices, labs, and pharmacies. Being able to provide readily available access to your personal health records is our goal.”

MedicAlert’s architecture is built around a business policy engine that contains all pre-existing policies. Web services can be deployed against the engine. The advantage, Mercado said, “you don’t have to recreate the policies from scratch for every new Web service you build.” Web services are built with both .NET and the Java Platform, he said.

Interestingly, MediAlert’s strategy was to start small with its SOA effort. “We did that really out of a need to solve immediate business requirements. We started small so that we could get results quickly. And as the business needs grew, and as time allowed, we then engaged more of a top down approach, which takes more into consideration the finer details about what the business wants out of a service.”

However, he added, the bottom-up approach only works for so long, until the effort needs to be addressed by the business at large. “Once you get the opportunity to engage a top down approach, or a meet-in-the-middle type of approach, you want to make sure that your services are modeled and designed properly. You can only achieve that if you get the business folks involved. You have to understand how 'this particular service needs to perform these functions in this manner.'”