SOA approach for integration of departmental systems.

In this paper a unified method for integration of departmental systems into the main systems of a healthcare organization is described. The approach is based on combining Business Process Modeling (BPM) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) methods and technologies. A top-down approach is used for modeling the care process and supporting care services which in turn are decomposed down to such a level of granularity that they can be described and implemented as web services described with Web Services Description Language (WSDL) documents. Then a bottom-up approach is used for wrapping the existing departmental systems and their interfaces into web services using Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). Finally the orchestration of the services is described using executable Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) code.