Service-oriented architecture in public health

Public health systems have been developed over many years and are costly to maintain or replace. Service-oriented architectures (SOA) have provided a way for these systems to remain viable and responsive to increasing demands for information and analysis. As healthcare entities look for strategies to effectively achieve "meaningful use:" of their EHR systems, SOA will emerge as one key technical strategy for enabling this functionality. This paper offers two case studies of core public health systems in different jurisdictions and the strategies used with SOA to extend system life and to enable new and important features.