Sharp HealthCare Uses Oracle SOA Suite as Foundation for Patient Portal

To improve the healthcare experience and quality of care for its patients, Sharp HealthCare is using Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle WebLogic Suite as the backbone for the mySharp patient portal, which provides patients with a unified view of their healthcare information.

Sharp HealthCare is a not-for-profit integrated regional health care delivery system that includes four acute-care hospitals, three specialty hospitals, two affiliated medical groups and a health plan, plus a full spectrum of other facilities and services.

The company is leveraging the standards-based infrastructure and comprehensive connectivity of Oracle Service Bus to integrate health record information in three disparate patient-care applications already in use in its hospitals and medical groups. These include GE Centricity Business, Allscripts Touchworks EHR and OnBase content management solutions.

Now, more than 48,000 patients rely on the mySharp portal to securely access medical records, view lab results and interact with their health care provider’s office.

From the mySharp portal, patients can also manage tasks like scheduling appointments and paying bills. Parents can also sign-up and manage their children’s healthcare records.

Sharp HealthCare also uses Oracle Database 11g and Oracle Advanced Compression to increase efficiency, reduce costs of managing data and improve the overall performance of the company’s data warehouse, which supports key business and clinical applications, including patient accounts and profiles.

With Oracle Service Bus and Oracle WebLogic Suite, Sharp HealthCare can easily add new back-end patient care systems to mySharp when necessary, creating a seamless patient experience.

Sharp HealthCare plans to expand the portal’s functionality to provide access to data in the Cerner Electronic Health Record systems used in its hospitals.

“Oracle Service Bus provides us with a lightweight, scalable platform to integrate our patient-care systems into a single patient portal, while Oracle WebLogic Suite gives us a highly reliable infrastructure to run our patient-care systems on. These Oracle technologies will also enable us to easily add applications in the future,” said Dave Dewey, Manager, Web Development, Sharp HealthCare. “The mySharp portal provides our patients with easy and secure access to their healthcare information, significantly improving their healthcare experience.”

“Consumers today expect to have information at their fingertips, when and where they need it. Progressive healthcare organizations, like Sharp HealthCare, understand that this same requirement increasingly applies to patients’ interactions with their healthcare providers,” said Marc Perlman, global vice president, Healthcare and Life Sciences, Oracle. “Sharp HealthCare gained a new level of connectivity with its patients by harnessing Oracle solutions as the foundation for its new patient portal, which seamlessly integrates information from diverse systems to provide a single, secure view of a patient’s information and interactions with Sharp HealthCare.”