I have a web app built in coldfusion that receives medical referral letters from primary care doctors (family doctors) for transmission to hospitals and specialists. The data comes in to a MySQL database and is the format
referral_ID (autoincrement)
patient_firstname (string) patient_lastname (string)
... other patient identifiers
org_from_ID (numeric) org_to_ID (numeric) datetime_added (datetime) message_status ( a bool reflecting pending or received by hospital)
... and other "meta" data
message (memo , this is a 1-2 page text, rtf or Word type file of the actual referral letter)
I want to allow hospitals to pick up the referrals directed to them. Most of the hospitals who are likely early adopters seem to be using MS technologies for their hospital Patient Administration Systems (PAS) and I'm assuming that the biggest programmer pool is using .NET so they are likely to use .NET savvy programmers to pick up this information into their systems ?
The functionality the API will need is
only be accessible from the predefined hospital system , so some sort of login passed
data encrypted between my app and hospital e.g via https
provide list of referral data between #startdate# and #enddate# for hospital_ID xyz
provide list of referrals that have been previously notified to the hospital that have now been cancelled.
I'm not worried about the coding of the API, just trying to work out what the is best format that easiest lets them consume the data feed for their organisation, whether to put the logic in a cfc access="remote" as a web service, provide HTTPS access simply via a web page using URL variables, use WDDX or what?
First of all, forget about WDDX. Use only JSON or plain and your .NET buddies will thank you. :)
If you don't want to use heavy SOAP webservices, you can try RESTful services with PowerNap.