Intel Corporation announced Intel SOA Expressway for Healthcare, software that provides a way to exchange healthcare information inside hospitals and with health information networks. The product will allow healthcare providers to connect with one another so that each can provide better care while benefiting from reduced integration costs.

Until now, the sharing of patient information among healthcare network participants has been hindered by the steep costs and complexities of proprietary data and integration services. Based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Intel SOA Expressway for Healthcare offers a solution to this problem by providing a way to translate, process and connect any data format across a healthcare network.

In addition, Intel has created a group of validated independent software vendors (ISVs) that provides best-of-breed capabilities to deploy a complete health network powered by the Intel SOA Expressway. Current validated ecosystem vendors include Apelon, Infotech Global (IGI), Initiate Systems, Oracle and Red Hat. Services provided by these vendors include controlled medical vocabulary translation, clinical patient portal applications, enterprise master patient index, clinical data repository and operating system support. The validated ecosystem helps complete next-generation SOA architecture for healthcare data interoperability.

The software solution has been piloted with several healthcare providers, including at a hospital network in Shanghai. “Intel SOA Expressway for Healthcare solved a very difficult hospital integration scenario for us,” said Shen Ping, general manager of Health Services Division at Wonders Information Co, the systems integrator deploying the Shanghai health network. “We were surprised to see that it was able to meet our performance requirements for daily synchronization of nearly a million hospital records in a short amount of time.”

Intel SOA Expressway for Healthcare provides the performance of a hardware appliance in a software form factor that offers native message acceleration for rapid data exchange, workflow management and translation to enable data exchange to and from any original format. This advance in software is an example of how technology can help improve patient care and reduce healthcare costs by streamlining information flow.

“Intel has developed the SOA Expressway for Healthcare as a platform that can be used with a wide variety of existing IT environments to provide world-class integration regardless of the specific electronic medical records and other software platforms used at individual healthcare facilities,” said Renee James, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Software and Solutions Group. “We also leveraged the SOA architecture to drive down costs, which has enabled Intel to offer our solution at prices comparable or below other solutions in the market.”

In order to make Intel SOA Expressway for Healthcare as versatile as possible, Intel designed it as a flexible product offering that can stand alone as the gateway to and from a community health information network or can be bundled as part of an ISV solution.

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