Is SOA a solution to Healthcare Information Systems interoperability?

Healthcare organizations seek to provide services of high quality and profound safety through Healthcare Information Systems (HIS). Despite significant efforts that have been made, the lack of interoperability still affects the services provided to the patient and citizen (diagnosis, treatment, prescribing, and rehabilitation). In this paper we (a) propose a novel healthcare services classification, (b) discuss HIS as well as the problems related to them and (c) suggest that the implementation of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) can increase the interoperability among systems and hence the quality of healthcare services.