Intel Corp. has been developing various computing platforms for the healthcare industry for several years now, but without the properly made software hardware can hardly bring any benefits and in order to address that issue the chipmaker has developed Intel SOA Expressway for Healthcare, software that provides an efficient way to exchange healthcare information inside hospitals and with health information networks

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 cost-efficient solution to this problem by providing scaleable way to translate, process and connect any data format across a healthcare network.

In addition, world’s largest producer of x86 microprocessors has created a group of validated independent software vendors (ISVs) that provides 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.

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.

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.

The software solution has been successfully piloted with several healthcare providers, including at a hospital network in Shanghai, according to Intel.

“Intel SOA Expressway for Healthcare solved a very difficult hospital integration scenario for us. 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,” said Shen Ping, general manager of health services division at Wonders Information Co, the systems integrator deploying the Shanghai health network.

“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. 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,” said Renee James, vice president and general manager of Intel’s software and solutions group.