BOSTON – Partners Healthcare is banking on service-oriented architecture, or SOA, to boost what information technology can do.

Together with technology company Siemens Medical Solutions, Malvern, Pa., Partners has launched an SOA project that Partners CIO John Glaser says will reap benefits within 12 months and for years to come.

The primary gains, in his view, will be enhanced interoperability and the creation of new IT-based services. SOA makes it possible to individually extend, reuse and access services – software components that implement a business task or process.

“In the next 12 months we are planning to aggressively instantiate medication, problem and eventing services,” Glaser said. “We expect to see near term gains in our ability to create new services and insert them into our applications. Long term should lead to many services and the agility, interoperability and standardization goals.”

Glaser said Siemens and Partners have similar approaches and expectations concerning SOA.

“By collaborating we (Partners) should be able to accelerate the development of services that we need and reduce the cost of service creation,” he said. “I believe that SOA, while over-hyped and still immature, is a very profound shift in the way that we think about and construct applications and effect interoperability.”

Analyst firm Gartner Inc. predicts that SOA will be used in more than 50 percent of new mission-critical operational applications and business processes designed in 2007 and in more than 80 percent by 2010.

“SOA adoption is greatly beneficial from the CIO’s point of view,” says L. Frank Kenney, research director for Gartner. “To keep pace with relentless business change, IT departments are constantly under pressure to deliver more in a flat-budget situation.”

Boston-based Partners HealthCare is an integrated health system founded by Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital. It includes community and specialty hospitals, community health centers, a physician network, and home health and long-term care services.

Siemens and Partners plan to jointly develop clinical services within Siemens’ Soarian SOA platform.

“Bringing SOA into healthcare information technology is truly cutting-edge,” said Janet Dillione, president, Health Services, the Healthcare IT Division of Siemens Medical Solutions. “The growing pressure to embrace interoperability and integration of technology and knowledge within the framework of initiatives such as the electronic health record demands no less than a completely new approach to the development of solutions, including the evolution of SOA.”