Siemens Medical Solutions USA and Partners HealthCare, Boston, Mass., have finalized an agreement in which the two organizations will collaborate on further development of a new service-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure in health IT.

Siemens and Partners will develop clinical services within the Soarian SOA platform. The SOA is a flexible architectural design strategy that is being deployed across its Soarian suite of applications. Soarian was designed with a workflow orientation that manages not just transactions and data, but also the process of healthcare and the interactions between members of the care team.

"Bringing SOA into healthcare information technology is truly cutting-edge. The growing pressure to embrace interoperability and integration of technology and knowledge within the framework of initiatives such as the electronic health record, demands no less than a completely new approach to the development of solutions, including the evolution of SOA," said Janet Dillione, president, health services, Siemens Medical Solutions.

SOA delivers the capability to individually extend, reuse and access services - software components that implement a business task or process. Deploying SOA into complex healthcare processes improves system flexibility and agility and greatly optimizes workflow throughout the healthcare enterprise.