The WW Health ICT Blog

director, worldwide health industry solutions

More efficient PC management and security for health organizations

teddyb — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 21:50:46 GMT

Windows Intune is one of many Microsoft cloud services that can help you centrally manage and secure your PCs with a comprehensive, end-to-end Microsoft solution that includes PC management, endpoint protection, Windows upgrades, and more. Whether for a clinic, hospital, health agency, payer, or other health organizations, Windows Intune will help you better manage your ICT risks and support your compliance initiatives. Windows Intune will help you:

- Manage software updates to all your PCs from a central location

- Safeguard your PCs from latest threats with centralized endpoint protection

- Track hardware and software assets to more efficiently manage you licenses

- Receive alerts on updates and threats for proactive monitoring of your PCs

- Assist users remotely to address issues they have with their PCs

- Set security policies to help protect your PCs even outside your network

Because the Windows Intune cloud service is hosted by Microsoft, you don't have the overhead of maintaining on-site PC management servers and software.

Windows Intune will be commercially available in over 30 countries on March 23, 2011. A free 30-day trial will be available on this date.

You can register to get notification on availability of the 30-day trial here.

More information on Windows Intune is available here.

director, worldwide health industry solutions

Microsoft HealthVault Community Connect

teddyb — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 00:35:13 GMT

Microsoft HealthVault Community Connect is a SharePoint Server and Microsoft Amalga based portal solution that enables healthcare organizations to easily generate electronic visit summaries and share them with their patients and provider community. HealthVault Community Connect helps health organizations provide better connections for better care:

· Connects your referral community

· Connects with your patients

· Connects with familiar technology

If you are interested in learning more how Microsoft technologies can help you unlock new services models to support your patients, referring providers, and bottom line, you can register for a complimentary webcast scheduled on Tuesday March 15, 2011.

During the webcast Karen Green (CIO, Brooks Rehabilitation) and Eric Moll (CAO, Mason General Hospital) will discuss how their organizations are leveraging Microsoft HealthVault Community Connect to better support their patients, referring providers and bottom lines.
During this webcast you will learn:

How Brooks Rehabilitation and Mason General Hospital are using Microsoft HealthVault Community Connect to better connect with their patients and referring communities
How HealthVault Community Connect can help you meet the Meaningful Use requirements related to "enabling patients and families" and "improving care coordination"
How HealthVault Community Connect can help clinicians improve the quality of care by providing them with a longitudinal view of their patients' health information
How providers can offer new online services to their patients and reduce cost of care by leveraging the rich ecosystem of HealthVault-enabled applications and devices

Register here to attend this webcast live or receive an email after the webcast with the presentation content if you cannot make it to the live event.

You can also learn more about HealthVault Community Connect and What’s Next in Health at Microsoft here.

director, worldwide health industry solutions

Resuming with Microsoft BitLocker Administration and Monitoring (MBAM)

teddyb — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 04:34:45 GMT

It’s been few months since my last blog due to focusing on various health ICT activities at Microsoft. During this time, I tried to send few updates on the Health ICT twitter feed #whealthict. I am now back at a point where I can resume the updates on this blog, with sincere apologies to our readers for this long interruption.

Today we announced that we are in the development process (early beta) to provide Microsoft BitLocker Administration and Monitoring (MBAM). I thought this would be a topic of great interest to ICT Professionals, ICT Compliance Managers and anyone working in the areas of security and compliance in the Health ICT world. MBAM will help your health organization more efficiently and cost effectively control health data breaches resulting from exposed (lost, stolen, or misplaced) desktops, laptops, hard drives, USB storage keys, etc.

MBAM will build on BitLocker available in Windows 7 today and help simplify BitLocker provisioning and deployment, reduce costs while improving compliance and reporting of BitLocker. The MBAM beta is expected to be available in March and you can sign up here (Windows Live ID required) to be notified when it is released. MBAM will available through the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) at a future date. Following is a summary of how MBAM can help you:

Integrates into existing Windows 7 deployment process: Organizations can integrate the MBAM client into their task sequence setup in System Center Configuration Manager/ Microsoft Deployment Toolkit or their other Windows 7 deployment tools. The client then automates the encryption process as part of the deployment.

End Users Can Start the Encryption Process: For organizations that deploy MBAM after they have deployed Windows 7, the MBAM agent provides a standard user the ability to start the encryption process. This enhances the BitLocker out of box experience where the end user must have administrative rights to accomplish this.

Target only the hardware you want to encrypt: ICT Professionals can exclude hardware by make and model, making sure that only machines capable of meeting the encryption policy are encrypted.

Improve Compliance and Reporting

Know how compliant the organization is: Security administrators and IT Professionals can understand which machines are encrypted and meet the organizational policy through out of the box reports.

More secure recovery key storage: ICT Professionals have an alternative to storing BitLocker recovery key information in Active Directory. Machines with the MBAM client will send BitLocker recovery key information to an encrypted Microsoft SQL Server database.

Reduce Support Costs

Streamline key recovery for the help desk: MBAM provides a web page that allows the help desk to quickly get the user’s recovery key if they get into BitLocker recovery mode. The help desk no longer needs access to Active Directory to access BitLocker recovery keys when the organization is using MBAM.

Use a recovery key only once: When a recovery key is retrieved and used, the MBAM client will automatically generate a new recovery key for that PC so that the original key cannot be used to gain access to the machine again

Empower end users to do the basics: MBAM allows an end user with standard user rights to perform basic BitLocker tasks like changing their PIN or start the encryption process which saves them from calling the help desk.

For more information on Bitlocker:

teddy bachour

director, worldwide health industry solutions

Call for Proposals for Microsoft HUG Exchange 2010 Now Open!

teddyb — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 18:45:06 GMT

Microsoft Health Users Group Exchange 2010 Transforming Health to Achieve Meaningful Use Microsoft Corporate Campus Redmond, WA September 22nd& 23^rd
Interested in presenting at Microsoft Health Users Group Exchange 2010 in Redmond, WA? The Call for Proposal process for the next event is now open! The Microsoft Health User Group is looking for submissions that detail innovative and inspiring solutions to healthcare, using Microsoft technology and frameworks. The following tracks are planned for the event: Developing Community Care - how to connect people, information and process to provide continuity of care. Topics may include RHIO, HIE, chronic condition management, wellness programs (e.g. weight loss or smoking cessation), home care, mobility and EMR. Intelligent Healthcare - gain an insight into Health Intelligence. Topics may include Business Intelligence, predictive modeling, QA reporting, operational efficiency, real time decision support, quality improvement, and population health metrics. Dynamic Infrastructure - build an infrastructure which is reliable and robust yet flexible to meet future demands. Topics may include Desktop Management, Server Management, Identity and Security, Virtualization, Cloud computing, seamless connectivity and mobility.
Please complete the online application by Friday, June 25, 2010 at 5:00 CDT to be considered as a possible presenter for this event. Submitters will be notified during the week of July 12th of the proposal status

*Please note: presentations must be focused on a Microsoft-based technology or solution. Please feel free to submit something that is relevant but outside of the scope of tracks listed. Be assured technical content is a plus.

director, worldwide health industry solutions

The Connected Health Platform Cloud and Clear.

Public comments period open for IHE IT Infrastructure (ITI) new supplements

teddyb — Wed, 26 May 2010 06:17:30 GMT

The IHE IT Infrastructure (ITI) Technical Committee has published the following supplements to the ITI Technical Framework for Public Comment. If you are involved with health data and information services projects, I encourage you to review these documents and post your comments before June 24.

Cross-Enterprise User Assertion - Attribute Extension (XUA++)
Deferred Document and Dynamically Created Content (D3S)
Healthcare Provider Directory (HPD)
Query Enhancements to Sharing Value Sets

The documents are available for download at http://www.ihe.net/Technical_Framework/public_comment.cfm. Comments should be submitted by June 24 to the online forums at http://forums.rsna.org/forumdisplay.php?f=198.

teddy bachour

senior industry technology strategist, ww health

Clinical Documentation Solution Accelerator now available for download!

teddyb — Wed, 12 May 2010 05:35:39 GMT

The Clinical Documentation Solution Accelerator (CDSA) for the Microsoft Office system is now released and available for you to download and start using in your clinical applications.

CDSA is a Connected Health Platform resource that enables you or your customer to define and create clinically encoded documents. Documents can be created based upon ready-made templates (for example, for a Discharge Summary or a Referral) retrieved using the Microsoft Office System.

Key Benefits for Your Organization

Improve productivity and reduce training costs
Quickly design and create clinical documents
Directly link to external data sources
Easily share encoded documents

You can find out more about the Clinical Documentation Solution Accelerator including overview and developer guidance videos at:

· The CDSA landing page is at http://www.mscui.net/CDSA.htm.

· The CDSA community project is at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/cdsa.

· The new version of MSCUI is at www.mscui.net.

You can find more information on all Connected Health Platform resources on the Health ICT Resource Center site at http://www.microsoft.com/HealthICT.

teddy bachour

senior industry technology strategist, ww health

Microsoft HUG Webcast on the Clinical Documentation Solution Accelerator (CDSA) - May 12

teddyb — Wed, 05 May 2010 17:32:27 GMT

I have a couple of blogs on CDSA here and here. CDSA was planned for release Mid April but we have experienced some delays. Andy Payne, the CUI PM from Microsoft UK who is leading this effort will provide an update on the new release date during the CDSA webcast. You can find below registration information for a webcast you don’t want to miss!

teddy bachour

senior industry technology strategist, ww health

Registration Now Open for the next Microsoft HUG Webcast: Creating Clinically Encoded, Interoperable Documents Using Microsoft Office Word 2010 and the Clinical Documentation Solution Accelerator

Wednesday, May 12, 2010
10:00 – 11:00 am CDT
(8:00 am PDT/ 10:00 am CDT / 11:00 pm EDT / 16:00 BST / 17:00 CEST)

Register Now!

The Clinical Documentation Solution Accelerator (CDSA) is a Connected Health Platform resource that enables you or your customer to define and create clinically encoded documents retrieved from a templates library (such as Discharge Summaries and Referral documents) using the Microsoft Office System. This Solution Accelerator promotes the safety and consistency of clinical documentation by utilizing the Microsoft Health Common User Interface software toolkit components to embed structured, machine readable clinical information encoded in industry standard formats (such as the HL7 CDA format) in a human-readable Microsoft Office document which can be shared across care boundaries.

Please join us for a demonstration of how you can quickly construct and customize encoded, interoperable clinical documents using CDSA and Microsoft Office Word 2010.

· These webcasts are FREE to all Microsoft HUG members / HIMSS members. You must have you Microsoft HUG/HIMSS membership # to register.

Speakers

Andy Payne, CUI PM Microsoft UKMCS

Martin Grayson, Consultant II Microsoft UKMCS

For more information visit the Microsoft HUG website.

Save the Date!

September 22nd and 23rd - Microsoft Health Users Group Exchange 2010: Redmond, WA

Don’t know your Microsoft HUG/HIMSS membership? microsofthug@himss.org

Not a member? You need to register for Microsoft HUG/HIMSS membership

Major updates to the Connected Health Platform guidance and tools

teddyb — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 15:37:48 GMT

Some of you may have noticed already that we have made a major updates to the Microsoft Connected Health Platform (CHP) area on the Health ICT Resource Center. The update affected the main CHP Silverlight based navigation UI and the guidance, tools and solution accelerator navigation page. The main CHP (Silverlight) page allows you to look at challenges, concerns, or issues from the perspective of a CEO, a CIO (or ICT Director) and a Care Professional. The UI will help you navigate to specific offerings (architecture, design and deployment guidance, tools or solution accelerators) that ICT departments in health organizations or partners can use today to build an Optimized Health ICT Infrastructure for the organization they serve.

These CHP offerings are built on top of a solid foundation of the Microsoft Infrastructure Optimization models and tools and further specialized for the health domain. They have also been used and validated in many solutions and deployments by our customers and partners worldwide.

The updates include various upgrades to existing guidance documents and tools and the following new guidance documents:

Microsoft Office Communications Server Design Guide
System Center Configuration Manager 2007 (SCCM) – To replace the guidance we had on Systems Management Server 2003

Deployment Guide
Software Distribution guidance
Software Update Management guidance
Operating System Deployment Guide

System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Guide

The following table provides detailed view of the changes included in this update:

teddy bachour

senior industry technology strategist, ww health

Release date for the Clinical Documentation Solution Accelerator

teddyb — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 13:48:37 GMT

Our team in the UK that is doing the great work on the Clinical Documentation Solution Accelerator (CDSA) for the Microsoft Office System, that we showcased at HIMSS earlier this month have indicated that it will be ready for general release on April 16th. CDSA is the release name for what was previously known as ‘Office Doctor’. ‘Office Doctor’ was showcased at HIMSS 2009 as a technology demonstrator product. This year we are releasing it as a full solution accelerator with guidance and source code that you can use to integrate this functionality in your products or solutions. You can access a video of the 2009 ‘Office Doctor’ here.

Our health specific solution accelerators, as the name indicates help you in two ways:

- The word ‘solution’ refers to the fact that they provide a basic solution or building block that addresses a common problem or challenge in the health domain. They are architected, built and designed using Microsoft and industry best practices and can be integrated and extended to fit your specific solution needs in the same domain scenario. These solution accelerators are available as free downloads along with source code where applicable and documentation.

- ‘accelerator’ means that they will help you accelerate your ramp up or learning experience on how to use our technology to solve the health domain problem(s) that the solution accelerator is meant to address. Since we have considerable engineering work done on these solution accelerators done upfront, they will help you speed time to market of your product or offering if you are a partner or planning and deployment of your solution if you are part of the ICT department in a health organization. Most importantly, for ICT managers and ICT project managers, these solution accelerators will help you better manage risks at different stages of the project lifecycle.

Following is a more detailed description of the CDSA that we will be releasing next month. You will be able to access it from the Health ICT Resource center:

The Clinical Documentation Solution Accelerator (CDSA) for the Microsoft^® Office system is a Connected Health Platform resource that enables you or your customer to define and create clinically encoded documents. You originate documents with ready-made templates (for example, for a Discharge Summary or a Referral) retrieved using the Microsoft Office System.

CDSA promotes the safety and consistency of clinical documentation by utilizing Microsoft Health Common User Interface software toolkit components. Those components support the embedding of structured, machine-readable clinical information in a human-readable Microsoft Office document shareable across care boundaries. The encoding of clinical information is to industry standard formats (such as the Health Level 7 (HL7) Clinical Document Architecture (CDA)).

This resource demonstrates the direct utilization of external clinical data (such as a cloud platform or Windows^® Azure™ source) in a document. Example external data sources include Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine - Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT^®) encoding services or drug reference data. This enables a powerful editing experience, specific to the healthcare domain but easy to use because it offers familiar, industry‑leading authoring tools, such as Microsoft^® Office Word 2007 or Microsoft^® Office Word 2010.

You can use CDSA as the foundation for clinical document workflows (for example, in combination with Microsoft^® Office SharePoint^® Server 2010). Tailor those to the specific Electronic Medical Record (EMR) or Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems in your own or your customer’s healthcare environment. In addition, CDSA will enable you to create clinical documents suitable for upload to a Personal Health Record (PHR) system (such as Microsoft^® HealthVault™), to an XDS.b system, or to other external storage.

It is easy to share clinical documents created using the CDSA, passing them across care boundaries whilst retaining the clinically encoded data. This is without the need for additional software on your reader’s computer. Systems integrating the CDSA functionality can also take advantage of Microsoft Office Information Rights Management (IRM) capabilities enabled by the Microsoft Windows Rights Management Services (RMS) to control access and usage of confidential health information stored in these documents regardless of where these documents are located.

teddy bachour

senior industry technology strategist, ww health

Answering the Health ICT Challenge: An Optimized Infrastructure

teddyb — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 04:59:42 GMT

This week we have released a new whitepaper entitled ‘Answering the Health ICT Challenge: An Optimized Infrastructure’. The whitepaper highlights the critical role of an optimized infrastructure as a foundation for meaningful use of health ICT systems. Meaningful use of Health ICT is not just a US issue, it is really about being able to demonstrate and measure improved quality, patient safety and best practices, and this is highly important regardless of country or region. Achieving, and more importantly, sustaining meaningful use of Health ICT will require an efficient, connected infrastructure, with improved service levels, and increased security and compliance. This is what ICT departments in health organization can deliver to the organization they serve with an Microsoft Optimized Infrastructure.

The whitepaper also provides a great overview of the architecture and technology assets we are making available to you such as the Connected Health Framework – Architecture and Design Blueprint and the Microsoft Connected Health Platform and related offerings including guidance, tools and solution accelerators, and what role they play in helping you build an Optimized Infrastructure that leverages your existing investments. To learn more, you can access the whitepaper here or from the Health ICT Resource Center.

teddy bachour

senior industry technology strategist, ww health

Microsoft U-Prove technology helps with both security and privacy

teddyb — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 16:09:11 GMT

At the RSA conference this week, Microsoft announced the availability of the U-Prove Community Technology Preview (CTP). The U-Prove CTP integrates with the Microsoft identity platform technologies (Windows Identity Foundation, Windows CardSpace 2.0, and Active Directory Federation Services 2.0) and enables the issuance and presentation of cryptographically protected claims in a manner that provides multi-party security. At the same time, the U-Prove technology enables any desired degree of privacy (including authenticated anonymity and pseudonymity) without contravening multi-party security.

Identity solutions enabled with U-Prove technology that provides more secure and private access to on-premise and cloud based applications through the minimal disclosure of information are critical for establishing trust in information and communication technology (ICT) systems for the health industry to encourage adoption and use of these systems by care professionals, patients, and other users of these health ICT systems. This is about the minimal disclosure of patient data, or consumer health data in general. Whether it is disclosure someone needs to make as a patient to other parties such as insurance, providers, community health, and pharmacies, or disclosures that other parties need to make about someone’s health information. For example, a patient only needs to disclose that they are over a certain age and that they have valid purchasing credentials to buy certain type of OTC medication without having to reveal their full identity or attributes such as their name or date of birth that are not necessarily needed for this specific transaction.

The U-Prove Cryptographic Specification V1.0 specifies the foundational features of the U-Prove technology. This specification has been published under the Open Specification Promise allowing anyone to use or implement the technology. As noted in the U-Prove CTP Whitepaper, the U-Prove cryptographic specification defines the computational steps of each protocol participant; other details (e.g., the encoding, contents, and storage of U-Prove artifacts) must be specified in an application profile. This provides greater flexibility to use the U-Prove technology in various frameworks. For example, existing security token types (e.g., X.509 certificates, SAML tokens, etc.) could be extended to support the U-Prove technology.

Following is an excerpt from the U-Prove Technology Overview document published this month by Dr. Stefan Brands, Principal Architect at Microsoft about the U-Prove technology:

‘More generally, the U-Prove technology can be used to reconcile seemingly conflicting multi-party security and privacy requirements in all sorts of electronic communication and transaction systems. Examples include digital rights management, electronic voting, electronic payment instruments, electronic health records, electronic postage, online auctions, public transport ticketing, road-toll pricing, loyalty schemes, and e-gaming. The U-Prove technology can also be applied to protect identity-related information pertaining to non-human entities, such as computer processes, software applications, hardware devices, and so forth. Furthermore, since entities can securely share information via any untrusted party while delegating partial control over its release to that party, the U-Prove technology enables the design of new applications with no physical-world analogy; one example area of interest is cloud computing services that can perform limited operations on integrity-protected input data from different sources.’

In an interview on Channel 9 with Vittorio Bertocci, Senior Architect Evangelist at Microsoft, Dr. Stefan discusses the U-Prove CTP, including the availability of C# and Java SDKs that Microsoft released under the BSD open-source license and can be downloaded from the MSDN Code Gallery. Dr. Stefan also covers some interesting scenarios in the health industry where the U-Prove technology brings a lot of value in the area of security and privacy of exchange of health data.

Watch the interview at the following link: http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Identity/Announcing-Microsofts-U-Prove-Community-Technical-Preview-CTP/

It should be noted that this technology area is covered by the Microsoft Connected Health Platform offering for Security and Compliance highlighted in the diagram below. Additional information about the Microsoft Connected Health Platform offerings can be accessed at the Health ICT Resource Center at http://www.microsoft.com/HealthICT.

teddy bachour

senior industry technology strategist, ww health

The Microsoft cloud story is out – We’re All In

teddyb — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 16:13:00 GMT

Often times we get driven by acronyms such as ones you are probably being bombarded with on daily basis. SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS. These acronyms provide a practical view and ‘How To’ steps to help those of us trying to figure out how to plug into The Cloud and add value to individuals, organizations, or government agencies. After all, clouds are what their name implies, fluffy, high in the sky, wet, with elastic shapes, etc. Synthesizing the cloud to three major categories was no easy task. However, we should not lose sight of the ecosystem and the broader value and opportunities that cloud computing is making available to us.

On Thursday this week, our CEO, Steve Ballmer, delivered a great speech to University of Washington computer-science students outlining the five dimensions that define the way people use and realize value in the cloud:

· The cloud creates opportunities and responsibilities

· The cloud learns and helps you learn, decide and take action

· The cloud enhances your social and professional interactions

· The cloud wants smarter devices

· The cloud drives server advances that drive the cloud

At HIMSS earlier this week, I met with several partners who have or are already building innovative health solutions using the Microsoft cloud platform and capabilities such as Azure, SharePoint, Bing, etc. One of these solutions that is making an impressive and highly disruptive use of Microsoft Surface and cloud computing platform is Jardogs LLC with its advanced kiosk and clinical concierge solutions. In the Clinical Documentation Solution Accelerator demo that we were showcasing at the Microsoft Connected Health Platform station, we had a real time connection to an Azure based drug reference database provided by our partner First DataBank, and a real time connection to a cloud based web service for terminology translation provided by our partner Health Language, Inc. Both showing the enhanced user experience, patient safety, efficiency, and at the same time providing clinical documentation capabilities that enable greater secondary uses of data with encoded clinical information for improved research, or decision making. The Clinical Documentation Solution Accelerator will be released as a Connected Health Platform offering in early April 2010. You can access all Connected Health Platform offerings including guidance, tools and solution accelerators from the Health ICT Resource Center site http://www.microsoft.com/HealthICT.

You can watch Steve Ballmer’s video speech at the University of Washington here.

teddy bachour

senior industry technology strategist, ww health

From Day 1 at HIMSS 2010 – Microsoft and Partners announcements

teddyb — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 03:07:26 GMT

I arrived to Atlanta late Saturday so that I can attend the Microsoft Health Users Group Exchange (Microsoft HUG) event on Sunday. Full day agenda with great conversations and sessions where Customers, Partners, and Microsoft presenters highlighted impressive health products and solutions. Microsoft HUG attendees got an early peak at the Health Community Connect Solution previously known as ‘Miami’ that Microsoft announced at HIMSS today, and at the Clinical Documentation Solution Accelerator that was showcased today and will be demoing Tuesday and Wednesday at the Connected Health Platform station at the HIMSS 2010 Microsoft Booth.

The next Microsoft HUG event will take place in Barcelona Spain on March 15, 2010 ahead of the WoHIT event.

Microsoft’s new health solution, HealthVault Community Connect, is a first-of-its-kind software solution that bridges the island of care from hospital to home to community clinic. HealthVault Community Connect unifies a patient’s electronic health information stored in disparate information and communication technology (ICT) systems within the hospital, and for the first time, makes it available to the patient and referring physician. In addition, patients can view, store and share their medical information from the hospital, and pre-register for hospital visits online.

HealthVault Community Connect is another health solution from Microsoft that aligns well with the theme of the presentation Microsoft is delivering tomorrow at the HIMSS 2010 Interoperability Showcase Booth – Theatre B at 2:45pm with the title ‘Better Health with Interoperability, Outcome Driven Care, and Individual Responsibility’.

Another announcement today from the Cleveland Clinic showing the results of a pilot that started in December 2008. During this pilot, participants with various chronic conditions used monitors at home and uploaded data to their HealthVault account which was also connected to the personal health record application and EMR system used by Cleveland Clinic’s healthcare providers. The project found a significant change in the average number of days between physician office visits for patients. Diabetic and hypertensive patients were able to make doctor’s office visits less often, increasing the number of days between appointments by 71 percent and 26 percent respectively, indicating that patients had better control of their conditions. Heart failure patients, however, visited their doctors more often, decreasing the number of days between visits by 27 percent, indicating that patients were advised to see their healthcare provider in a more timely manner.

teddy bachour

senior industry technology strategist, ww health

February 2010 Release of Microsoft Health CUI

teddyb — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 05:48:00 GMT

The Microsoft team in the UK just completed another development cycle on the Microsoft Health Common User Interface (CUI) guidance and tools. The Microsoft Health CUI provides user interface Design Guidance, Toolkit controls, and a technology demonstrator, that address a wide range of patient safety concerns for healthcare organizations worldwide, enabling a new generation of safer, more usable and compelling health applications to be quickly and easily created. I had an earlier post on the Microsoft Health CUI here. Microsoft Health CUI is one of the Connected Health Platform solution accelerators that address challenges and needs that are specific to the health industry. You can access the Microsoft Health CUI, and all other Connected Health Platform guidance, tools and solution accelerators from the Health ICT Resource Center at www.microsoft.com/healthict. The new release includes one new guidance document in the Patient Identification category, three design groundwork exploration documents in the Clinical Noting and Terminology category, and 2 new controls in the Medication category. You can get full details on the February 2010 release here.

teddy bachour

senior industry technology strategist, ww health

The Microsoft Connected Health Platform at HIMSS 2010, Atlanta

teddyb — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 18:43:00 GMT

For the latest information on the great solutions, innovations, and offerings that Microsoft and our Partners are showcasing at the Microsoft booth at HIMSS 2010 in Atlanta Georgia, please check here.

This post will be focusing on the activities we have planned for Microsoft Health User Group Exchange event on Feb 28^th and HIMSS 2010 on March 1^st to 4^th at the Georgia World Conference Center in Atlanta Georgia around Optimizing ICT Infrastructure for health organizations and how we support it with the Microsoft Connected Health Platform (CHP).

Three main activities around the Microsoft CHP:

1. Office 2010 in Health session at the Microsoft Health User Group event including a demo of the new Clinical Documentation Solution Accelerator

2. The Microsoft Connected Health Platform station at the Microsoft booth

3. The Microsoft open source XDS.b Registry/Repository Solution Accelerator at the HIMSS 2010 Interoperability Showcase booth

1. Microsoft Health Users Group on Feb 28^th – During this one day event in Atlanta, we will deliver a session around Office 2010 in Health that will include a demo of the Clinical Documentation Solution Accelerator (CDSA) for the Microsoft Office system, a new CHP solution accelerator that will be publicly released in early April. If you are interested to hear how Office 2010 can help you to:

- Equip your staff to find insights from information

- Support connected care from virtually anywhere

- Improve responsiveness and productivity through secure collaboration

- Deliver the essentials in security, manageability, and performance

Then, make sure you are registered for Microsoft Health Users Group membership and attend the Office 2010 session on Feb 28^th. By joining the Microsoft Health Users Group you get in on the inside track to the latest healthcare technology information, the leading solutions from the world's largest information and communication technology vendors, and the largest network of Microsoft users. You can access the Microsoft Health Users Group site here for more info on the Feb 28^th sessions agenda and membership.

CDSA is a resource that enables our partners and customers to define and create clinically encoded documents retrieved from a templates library (such as Discharge Summaries and Referral documents) using the Microsoft Office System. This Solution Accelerator promotes the confidentiality of patient data with Information Rights Management (IRM) capabilities available in the Microsoft Office System , and promotes safety and consistency of clinical documentation by utilizing the Microsoft Health Common User Interface (CUI) software toolkit components to embed structured, machine readable clinical information encoded in industry standard formats (such as the HL7 CDA format) in a human-readable Microsoft Office document which can be shared across care boundaries. The CDSA demo will show how external, cloud or azure based, clinical data sources such as SNOMED-CT encoding services and Drugs reference data sources can be utilized directly from the document to enable a rich document editing experience specific to the healthcare domain, using familiar industry leading document authoring tools such as Microsoft Word.

It can be used as the foundation on which clinical document workflows can be created (using Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 for example) which are tailored to the environment and EMR or EHR systems present in your or your customer’s healthcare organizations today. CDSA can enable clinical documents suitable for upload to a PHR system such as HealthVault, an IHE XDS system, or other external storage media or systems.

Clinical documents created using this Solution Accelerator can be easily shared across clinical care boundaries whilst retaining the clinically encoded data, without need for additional software to be present on the reader’s PC.

2. The Microsoft CHP station, March 1^st to March 4^th – We will have a Microsoft CHP station part of the Microsoft booth space. We will be showing two demos on this station. The CDSA demo mentioned above will be showcased by the amazing Microsoft team in the UK that built the Microsoft CUI guidance and tools and many of the Microsoft CHP resources you can access on the Health ICT Resource Center at www.microsoft.com/HealthICT. This is an opportunity for you to connect with the CDSA team leads and discuss how you can accelerate integration of this solution accelerator in your product or offerings or how to implement efficient clinical documentation and workflow scenarios in your health organization.

The second demo is the Health with Windows 7 demo. This is a impressive demo that was built by our two partners Versus Technology and iLink Systems. The demo covers an end to end patient-physician encounter where the patient goes through admission, meets with the staff and his physician, and is finally discharged from the clinic. You will see how Real Time Location (RLTS) solutions such as the one offered by Versus Technology and the use of Windows 7 features around Touch and Multi-Touch, speech recognition, BitLocker and BitLocker To Go encryption, considerably enhances the experience of the patients and staff as they move through the clinic and interact with the clinical applications and systems.

The Microsoft CHP is a rich collection of offerings including guidance, tools, and solution accelerators for building infrastructure, platform, and information management capabilities and services, leveraging your existing infrastructure investments, for supporting and sustaining meaningful use of information and communication technology in health. The Microsoft CHP station will be a great place for you to engage with the Microsoft team at the CHP station and hear how information and communication technology (ICT) departments in health organizations are using our core infrastructure offerings around Optimized Desktops and Devices, Optimized Server and Datacenter and Security and Compliance as strategic partners to the health organization they serve to drive value from their infrastructure investments.

3. The HIMSS 2010 Interoperability Showcase, March 1^st to March 4^th – As I indicated on this January 30^th post, we have been preparing for participating in the HIMSS 2010 Interoperability Showcase with the Microsoft Open Source XDS.b Document Registry and Document Repository Solution Accelerator. If you are exploring a document based sharing solution, you can stop by the HIMSS 2010 Interoperability Showcase booth and talk to the Microsoft and iLink Systems Partner team about how you can use the Microsoft Open Source XDS.b implementation to speed time to market or speed integration and deployment of the solution in your health organization or your customer’s organization. As part of our participation in the HIMSS 2010 Interoperability Showcase this year as well, we will be delivering a 20-25 minute presentation on March 2^nd at 2:45pm at Theatre B. The presentation title is ‘Better Health With Interoperability, Outcome Driven Care and Individual Responsibility’ and will highlight the work we are doing around interoperability in our health solutions and offerings. The presentation will also show how we enable better individual and population care delivery through a triangle comprised of interoperability, focus on processes for improved care outcomes, and patient or consumer empowerment. This will be an opportunity for you to connect with some on the Microsoft team that is engaged with standards and interoperability organizations such as IHE or HL7.

Safe travels and we look forward to seeing you at HIMSS in less than two weeks!

teddy bachour

senior industry technology strategist, ww health

Microsoft Connected Health Platform Virtual Lab and Demo system

teddyb — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 22:03:00 GMT

One of the priority areas we’ve been heavily focusing on lately is around optimizing information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure investments for health organizations. Optimizing ICT is enabled through the Connected Health Platform (CHP) offerings including a broad collection of guidance, tools, and solution accelerators available to you on the Health ICT Resource Center at http://www.microsoft.com/HealthICT. This can help ICT Departments in health organizations build optimized infrastructure and platform capabilities and services that leverage existing investments as a foundation to support meaningful use of ICT. More on Optimizing ICT and the new offerings around Optimized Desktops and Devices, Optimized Server and Datacenter, Security and Compliance, and Health Integration and Interoperability in future posts. What I would like to highlight on this post is the new availability of a virtual environment that you can access to learn about and, if needed, to demo many of the CHP solution accelerators we have available today.

The CHP collaboration solution accelerators provide a starting point to address common collaboration requirements in healthcare organizations. The virtual lab environment, that you can access from the Microsoft Public Sector Online Demo/Labs site at http://microsoftpsdemos.com/, contains the CHP solution accelerators listed below. The solution accelerators software, administrators guide, release notes and other supporting information can be downloaded from the Health ICT Resource Center referenced above:

Collaboration Fundamentals provides on-demand collaborative workspaces, discussion forums and a people directory.

Electronic Forms provides Microsoft Office InfoPath® 2007 building blocks to enable form designers to assemble electronic forms rapidly.

Managing Meetings provides a shared workspace where meeting attendees or committee members can share agendas, papers, presentations and actions.

Policies and Procedures provides a central location to publish, maintain and discover policy and guideline information.

Scorecards provides guidance on configuring a management dashboard to track organizational metrics.

Template Gallery provides a central location for users to publish, discover, rate and discuss document templates, spreadsheet templates and email templates.

For each of these solution accelerators, two scripts are provided. The “Level 100” script is for someone who needs to demonstrate the solution accelerator functionality. The “Level 200” script supplements the demonstration with additional technical information for users who want to learn more about the supporting capabilities.

If you are accessing the Microsoft Public Sector Online Demo/Labs site for the first time, you may want to check the information below. This and additional support documentation is also available at the site online:

First time users need to run the Browser Setup Script on the Home page of the site to configure their Browser to use the RDP connection.

To run a demo on the Microsoft Public Sector Online Demo site, you can either run a demo on-demand or schedule a demo for a later time.

· To run a demo on-demand

o After logging into the Online Demo/Lab System (you can login either via Windows Live ID or Registered User ID)

o Click the Catalog Tab

o Select the Demo from the Solution Catalog to run

o Click Schedule on the right hand side

o Select Now for Time, your local Time-Zone, and Duration to run the demo/lab, then click Submit

o The demo/lab will take 1-2 minutes to start up and then you will see the status of the demo/lab change to Running

o When the demo/lab is running, you will see a link under the Remote Workspaces at the bottom of the page

o Click the link in the Remote Workspaces to connect to the Online demo/lab Image to start the demo

o When completed with the demo/lab, just logout of the remote connection.

· To schedule a demo for later time

o After logging into the Online Demo/Lab System (you can login either via Windows Live ID or Registered User ID)

o Click the Catalog Tab

o Select the Demo/Lab from the Solution Catalog to run

o Click Schedule on the right hand side

o Select Date you want to run the demo/lab, then select the Time, your local Time-Zone, and Duration to run the demo/lab, then click Submit

o About 15 minutes before your schedule time, the demo/lab will pre-start for you.

o When the demo/lab is running, the user will see a link under the Remote Workspaces at the bottom of the page

o Click the link in the Remote Workspaces to connect to the Online demo/lab Image to start the demo

o When completed with the demo/lab, just logout of the remote connection.

teddy bachour

senior industry technology strategist, ww health

Microsoft IHE/XDS.b Open Source Solution Accelerator passes NA Connectathon 2010

teddyb — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 06:25:00 GMT

Earlier this month, Microsoft participated in the five day IHE interoperability testing in Chicago - aka NA Connectathon - with our open source XDS.b Registry and Repository Solution Accelerator on CodePlex that you can access from the Health ICT Resource Center at http://www.microsoft.com/healthict. We successfully tested both Document Registry and Document Repository Actors with the Asynchronous Web Services Exchange Option and the associated HITSP specs T15, T16, T17 and TP13b. We have also updated the Solution Accelerator code base to use SQL Server 2008 and .NET 3.5. We have released a beta version on CodePlex on January 5th and will be releasing an updated version with all fixes from the Connectathon in the next few days.

This is the second year we get great support from our partner iLink Systems in integrating the latest CPs, all the testing activities leading to and including the Connectathon. They will also help us with the Interoperability Showcase at HIMSS 2010 in Atlanta.

There were 104 vendors this year at the NA Connectathon, with 150 Health ICT systems, close to 500 test engineers running a total of 3650 interoperability tests!

We have been participating in IHE Connectathons and the related Interoperability Showcases at HIMSS NA for the past 3 years. This year, we will also participate in the World of Health IT (WoHIT) Interoperability Showcase in Spain scheduled later in March 2010.

IHE has set up a product registry site http://product-registry.ihe.net that gives users access to the IHE Integration Statements published by vendors to describe the conformance of their products with the IHE Technical Framework. You can also check the NA 2010 Connectathon results from the IHE site http://connectathon-results.ihe.net/.

Now we are getting ready for the interoperability showcases in Atlanta and Barcelona! If you are attending any of these events, make sure you visit the showcase booth and pass by the Microsoft stand to see what we are doing in the area of interoperability.

teddy bachour

senior industry technology strategist, ww health