Chapter 8
Service-Oriented Architecture for Electronic Health Records
As members (hospitals, physician practices, health centers, and non-acute providers) joined Partners they brought their clinical information systems with them. The result was a set of systems from a diverse collection of vendors and a substantial base of internally developed systems. This diversity did not add up to an integrated whole.1
Partners is a federated health system, and each of its members was allowed to maintain its own brand and identity. Each member was given financial and care quality goals, but members had great latitude in how they met the goals. During Partners early years, the result was modest pressure to integrate care across the entities. Although Partners ...
