2 Integration Concepts

OHI Components applications are designed to operate as a component in a component-based or service oriented architecture. This guide provides an overview of the
integration capabilities of OHI Components applications. Additional information with respect to OHI Components applications integration points is available in other guides, for example:

• See the Installation Guide for service endpoint URLs and configuration options for these
• See the Security Guide for guidance on properly securing integration endpoints

2.1 Integrating with OHI Components Applications

This chapter introduces techniques and patterns used for integrating with OHI Components applications. The following principles played an important role for designing the integration services:

• Use of well-known, proven standards that are widely supported by tools and middleware of many vendors in the IT industry
• Avoid interoperability issues, allowing customers to use OHI Components applications with the IT services they already own and operate

Common integration techniques used in OHI Components applications are:

• File-based integration is used for importing or exporting large sets of data. Examples include imports of ICD-9 or ICD-10 code systems and export of financial messages that are generated in OHI Components Claims or OHI Components Value-Based Payments.
• SOAP web services are used for exchanging business data with other applications in a health insurance payer’s IT landscape. For SOAP web services in OHI Components applications the ‘service contract’ is defined by Oracle in the form of a WSDL that defines the service operations and XSDs that define the message payloads. Oracle also defines the WSDL and XSDs for web services that are called from OHI Components applications.
• RESTful style web services are also available for interacting and integrating with OHI Components applications. Formal specifications for RESTful services is available in the form of RAML documents that are bundled with each application.

Going forward, any new services will be developed as RESTful services, no new SOAP services will be added.

Oracle develops SOAP web services with JAX-WS, the reference implementation for developing SOAP web services in Java whereas RESTful services are constructed using JAX-RS, the reference implementation for developing RESTful web services in Java.

All web services in OHI Components applications perform stateless operations.