Oracle SOA Suite Integrates Multiple Health Care Data Standards

Oracle Healthcare has launched the Service-Oriented Architecture Suite for Healthcare Integration to simplify messaging and data collaboration by using a unified application infrastructure and providing support for several data standards.

The application provides simplified dashboards and advanced monitoring tools. Using the dashboards, health care organizations can more easily track documents and messages from doctors.

In addition, the SOA Suite adds compliance with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) 5010 and maps to customizable HIPAA standards. HIPAA 5010 is a standard for processing transactions in the health care industry.

Oracle launched the SOA Suite for Healthcare Integration Oct. 25.

The application is a component of the health care extension for SOA Suite 11g, which enables organizations to design, assemble, deploy and manage business applications.

SOA Suite’s management console and monitoring environment will bring a faster time to market for health care products, Oracle reports. In addition, the application is built on Fusion Middleware 11g, a platform launched in 2009 that allows enterprises to develop and run business applications.

The suite will now enable collaboration across various health care platforms, according to Oracle.

“Oracle SOA Suite for Health Care Integration enables advanced capabilities, which allows health care organizations to simplify and jump-start their integration initiatives with a highly flexible platform for collaboration across all health care domains,” Marc Perlman, global vice president of health care and life sciences at Oracle Healthcare, said in a statement.

“With the launch of Oracle SOA Suite for Health Care Integration, Oracle has merged specialized health care integration capabilities into a unified enterprise application infrastructure platform,” Michael Weingartner, vice president of product development at Oracle, said in a statement.

The SOA Suite now provides messaging collaboration within health systems across various messaging standards such as Health Level Seven International (HL7) and X12N. HL7 is a standard for interoperability of health care information, and X12N is an insurance standard governed by the Accredited Standards Committee (ASC X12).

The suite also adds support for the data exchange standards TCP/IP, Minimal Lower Level Protocol (MLLP)-the protocol for transferring HL7 messages over TCP/IP-and Applicability Statement 2 (AS2), which provides guidelines on how to transfer data over the Internet.

With health care standards now embedded in the Oracle SOA Suite, health care organizations can become more efficient by lowering operating costs and reducing time to market, Weingartner said.

Health care companies will need to integrate data to meet industry goals on electronic health records (EHR) and personalized medicine, according to Perlman.

“[Data integration] has remained, however, one of the industry’s greatest challenges due to the disparate systems and numerous types and forms of data present in the health care enterprise-from physician notes and lab data to medical images and genetic data.” he explained.

Additional features in the SOA Suite include drag-and-drop for building metadata-driven applications and end-to-end visibility for enterprise-wide projects.

Meanwhile, on Oct. 17, Oracle launched a cloud application for health care called OutcomeLogix On Demand 3.0 to allow life science companies and research organizations to collect data on therapy outcomes in the late stages of trials.