Information technology can help create a cohesive, collaborative environment wherein doctors, pharmacists, and health insurance companies will all contribute to a service tailored to each patient – a service that is highly efficient and draws on the latest healthcare methods. For example, Mr. Tan, age 50, works in customer support for a global company and spends a lot of his time on the road. Stressful jobs are commonplace today, but to complicate matters, Mr. Tan suffers from diabetes.

Fortunately, because of the integrated network of healthcare facilities and providers in Mr. Tan’s country, in an emergency situation should Mr. Tan be out on the road and have a severe attack, he can walk into any hospital or care center, hand the administrator his ID or patient ID card and all of the doctors and hospitals dealing with Mr. Tan have access to his complete patient file and his latest test results.

Providing this information to any doctor who deals with Mr. Tan contributes greatly to preventing misdiagnoses, over-dosage, or redundant treatments. It also allows Mr. Tan the power to make decisions about his own treatment process.

Unfortunately, while IT is making a strong contribution to standardizing and streamlining business processes, this collaboration is still patchy.

Inefficiency drives costs—SOA can help

The financial burden on both state-run and private healthcare systems worldwide is immense already and process inefficiency and lack of transparency are huge cost drivers within healthcare. Where other industries have streamlined their business models and processes over the years to make them simpler and cheaper, the healthcare field still has a large amount of redundancy and a poor flow of information because it has not improved the way its services are delivered.

Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an application architecture that creates interfaces via a series of repeatable tasks or processes. The interfaces are platform-independent and can coexist with processes already working within an application so that the existing IT infrastructures of various healthcare entities can interact with one another seamlessly.

By establishing a streamlined network for healthcare operations, both state-run and private healthcare environments can cut administrative and superfluous procurement costs and re-allocated saved money stores to new disease research and patient-facing operations.

Patient centricity” and collaboration

Today’s consumer-savvy patients want more control over how and where they receive treatment, especially with rising insurance premiums. Patients look around for where they can get the same quality of care for less money. They are no longer passive recipients of services, trusting whatever doctors tell them. They have their own voices and make their own decisions.

To make a decision, however, patients need to have the right information at their fingertip and need to be sure that everyone else involved in their care case does, as well. In the example of Mr. Tan, he not only needed to know about his state of health, but he and his regular doctor need to be sure that his medical details and insurance information are available to doctors during emergency. Doctors, hospitals, pharmacies, and insurance companies all have to be able to exchange information to ensure the best interest of the patient.

What is even more advantageous to this collaboration of players—which will be good new