Using ESB and BPEL for Evolving Healthcare Systems Towards Pervasive, Grid-Enabled SOA

Healthcare organizations often face the challenge of integrating diverse and geographically disparate information technology systems to respond to changing requirements and to exploit the capabilities of modern technologies. Hence, systems evolution, through modification and extension of the existing information technology infrastructure, becomes a necessity. Moreover, the availability of these systems at the point of care when needed is a vital issue for the quality of healthcare provided to patients. This chapter takes a process perspective of healthcare delivery within and across organizational boundaries and presents a disciplined approach for evolving healthcare systems towards a pervasive, grid-enabled service-oriented architecture using the enterprise system bus middleware technology for resolving integration issues, the business process execution language for supporting collaboration requirements and grid middleware technology for both addressing common SOA scalability requirements and complementing existing system functionality. In such an environment, appropriate security mechanisms must ensure authorized access to integrated healthcare services and data. To this end, a security framework addressing security aspects such as authorization and access control is also presented.