Thats what Medical-Objects is working on at the moment? Our realtime clients are now starting to be more routinely deployed to receive data and increasingly to send data.
These clients live behind firewalls but have a public web based interface that supports SOAP and Http interfaces.
They exist in environments that could not and should not be opening listening ports because of lack of IT support. How is this done – by applying the “Proxy Pattern” Medical-Objects are now running a suite of proxy servers who will hand encrypted data to the waiting clients and then forward the response back to the sender in realtime. This is not store and forward, but realtime connectivity. All HL7 processing is done at the client.
This means you can deliver results directly to GPs desktops and know that it got there (or did not) in realtime. Combine this with an mind boggling array of prebuilt and tested message transforms and you have a distributed flexible realtime secure network. Clients can even run off multiple proxies to reduce to potential for a single point of failure and all messaging is point to point.
Obviously this model needs services, we have well tested routing directory and provider directory services to support this and the overhead is small. We estimate that that a single appserver could proxy 2000-4000 practices in this way.
Realtime messaging opens many doors for the provision of services and we are excited about the future of this technology. It makes EMail messaging look like the telephony equivalent of a telegram.