Two years and several Web services projects later, Providence Health System is systematically using the nascent technology to craft a network of reusable components that likely will save it more than $1 million per year, lead to better patient care and potentially save lives.

Providence, a 606,000-member system of hospitals, clinics and assisted-living complexes in the Northwest, is in the second phase of a multi-step Web services project. The project will make medical and other records, which are spread across disparate systems, accessible to patients and physicians through portal-based applications.

Two years ago, the Seattle healthcare company got its first taste of Web services with a project that created profiles that made it easier for patients to interact over the Web with the healthcare provider, a nonprofit that the Sisters of Providence ministries established in 1859 (see our earlier story on Providence).

The latest project is a Web service that pulls together in no more than 3 seconds all the electronic medical records a patient's primary care physician has stored, the company says.

If a patient walks into a Providence emergency room in the evening, the staff could look up his name and discover his primary care physician earlier that day had performed a particular test or procedure. The staff could access the results and avoid the cost of a repeat procedure.

The system aggregates data from 27 physician offices. Those offices operate within Providence and store their data in back-end billing, clinical, laboratory and ambulatory care record systems in 10 Oracle databases Providence maintains on its network.

"This is more of a business-based ROI based on what this new technology will allow physicians to do," says Mike Reagin, director of research and development. "It is significant to say that potentially making this technology available to physicians can save us $700,000 per year." That's in addition to savings Providence gets with its Profile Manager Web service introduced two years ago.

As its Web services effort has evolved, Providence has created its version of a service-oriented architecture (SOA) built on a component collection that provides simple and reusable interfaces for incorporating patient data into an application.

"We feel we have achieved an SOA by being able to use the same integration across different lines of business and different customers internally," Reagin says. "It's the first time that has happened with our integration."

He says the SOA is defined on his network and in the application development process.