Hospital IT infrastructures form a complex transactional environment in which pulling applications and information together can be not just mission-critical, but also a matter of life and death. Entrenched proprietary systems store patients' clinical, radiological, demographic and billing information as text, images and voice-annotated reports. That information must be dealt with in accordance with strict clinical priorities and federal regulations. An increasing number of health care organizations are using Web services and service-oriented architectures to make critical connections in their information systems.
