Health Plans Industry Technology Strategist

Use SQLServer 2008 SQL Server Reporting Services to Power Complex, Heterogeneous Reporting Needs Across the Health Plan Enterprise

2009-03-25T04:58:00Z

SQLServer 2008 is powerful. The list of new features and enhancements is exhaustive, but the one to really focus on for health plans is the reporting services engine. Health plans traditionally consist of heterogeneous, disparate, and complex systems that prove to be difficult and challenging to integrate. Until now…The reporting engine in SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services enables the pulling together of data from multiple heterogeneous sources from across an Enterprise. Large and complex reports can be produced in various formats, including list, chart, table, matrix, and tablix (a table/matrix hybrid). SQLServer 2008 reporting services can create reports that can be accessed and managed through a Microsoft SharePoint Services site, simplifying administration, security, and collaboration, and making reports more easily available.Reports can incorporate data from Oracle, SQL Server, DB2 and many other sources. Multiple report formats are readily available for making maximum visual impact of data. Overall SQLServer 2008 reporting services simplifies report creation, administration and overall access. Additional information and resources can be found at SQL Server Reporting Services. Also, go to http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/trial-software.aspx for a free 180 day trial version of SQLServer 2008 or contact me, Hector Rodriguez at hector.rodriguez@microsoftcom for more information.

Ready for BizTalk Server 2009 and Support for HIPAA 5010 with enhanced Business Intelligence Capabilities?

2009-03-25T01:56:00Z

·We're getting ready, almost there, are you? - As Microsoft puts the finishing touches on BizTalk 2009 our health care partners and clients should be finalizing their plans to support the new CMS mandated HIPAA 5010 standards while increasing their reporting capabilities. With full support for the 5010 schemas, BizTalk 2009 also provides enhanced Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) functionality and plugs directly into Microsoft’s Business Intelligence platform. With SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services providing support for UDM cubes and scalable real-time aggregations these BizTalk 2009 services enhance support for Microsoft PerformancePoint Server 2007. More information can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/en/us/roadmap.aspx . We're also working with the product team and our Connected Services Division to put together a solution framework that will make it easier, faster, and cost effective to adopt the BizTalk 2009 HIPAA 5010 solution. For more information please contact me, Hector Rodriguez, at hector.rodriguez@microsoft.com .

BizTalk 2006 R3 is now BizTalk 2009 and it's bigger and better with some exciting new capabilities.

2008-09-10T06:20:00Z

What was originally going to be BizTalk 2006R3 is so full of new features, functions, and capabilities that is has become its own product - now called BizTalk Server 2009, this new version builds on the existing integration capabilities, which make it easier and less expensive to connect systems within an organization as well as those of partners and customers. BizTalk Server 2009 enhances enterprise connectivity with broad industry support of WS* protocols, the edge via Microsoft BizTalk RFID, and business partners though EDI.

BizTalk Server 2009 version continues to build on the investments made to address the concerns of service oriented architecture and enterprise connectivity and includes:

New Application Platform Support - supports the latest Microsoft platform technologies, including Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 SP1, SQL Server 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. These platform updates enable greater scalability and reliability, and many advances in the latest developer tools
New Hyper-V Virtualization Support - now takes advantage of the latest virtualization improvements included as part of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, which can lead to reduced costs through lower hardware, energy, and management overhead, plus the creation of a more dynamic IT infrastructure.
Improved Failover Clustering - By taking advantage of Windows Server 2008 clustering, BizTalk Server is now able to be deployed in multi-site cluster scenarios, where cluster nodes could reside on separate IP subnets and avoid complicated VLANs.
New Web Services Registry - BizTalk Server 2009 includes a UDDI 3.0 registry which provides support for registry affiliation, extended discovery services, digital certificates and extensibility for a subscription API.
New Line of Business Adapters- BizTalk Server 2009 provides two new adapters for Oracle E-Business Suites and SQL Server, plus additional improvements have been made to the existing set of adapters.
Enhanced Host Systems Integration- BizTalk Server 2009 adds a new WCF WebSphere MQ channel by providing the transport, data formatter and encoder to integrate directly with WebSphere MQ via WCF and a new WCF Service for Host Applications has been added to expose the traditional Transaction Integrator to .NET Framework developers. Additionally, BizTalk Server 2009 includes updated platform support for the most recent versions of CICS, IMS, CICS HTTP transport, DB2, DB2/400, DB2 Universal Database, and WebSphere MQ.
Enhanced Business Activity Monitoring- By expanding the out of the box BAM functionality with SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services, BizTalk Server 2009 provides support for UDM cubes and scalable real-time aggregations which enhances support for Microsoft PerformancePoint Server 2007.
Enhanced Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Guidance - ESB Guidance 2.0 delivers updated prescriptive guidance for applying ESB usage patterns, improved itinerary processing, itinerary modeling using a visual Domain Specific Language (DSL) tools approach, a pluggable resolver-adapter pack, and an enhanced ESB management portal.
Enhanced Support for EDI and AS2 Protocols - BizTalk Server 2009 provides support for multiple message attachments, configurable auto message resend, end-to-end filename preservation, improved reporting to address new features, and Drummond re-certification for AS2.
Updated SWIFT Support - By building on a rich SWIFT foundation, BizTalk Server 2009 updates all message schemas and business rules for compliance with SWIFTReady Financial EAI Gold certification, as a result adds support for SWIFT FIN Flat File message types and business rules, BIC Plus IBAN interface, and Extensibility to support SEPA Routing.
New Mobile RFID Platform and device management - BizTalk Server 2009 delivers a new lightweight platform for a variety of mobile devices, which simplifies the development of mobile applications that expose relevant, real-time business information. BizTalk RFID Mobile includes support for enhanced device management, Powershell support for administration of edge infrastructures and the ability to monitor RFID infrastructure using System Center Operations Manager 2007.
New RFID industry standards support - Support for key industry standards (including LLRP, TDT, TDS, WS Discovery and partial EPCIS support).
New Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) support - BizTalk Server 2009 provides support for Team Foundation Server (TFS), and allows development teams to be able to leverage the integrated source control, bug tracking, support for team development, Project Server integration and support for automating builds via MSBuild.
Enhanced Developer Productivity - BizTalk Server 2009 introduces a number of improvements have been made to the underlying Visual Studio based BizTalk project system which enhances debugging support for artifacts such as BizTalk Maps (XSLT), pipeline components and XLANG Orchestrations, and enables support for unit testing via Visual Studio Test.
Messaging - BizTalk Server 2009 improves recoverable interchange processing of validation failures by providing support for recoverable interchange processing for disassembly (DASM) and a validation stage within the pipeline. The WCF Adapter has been enhanced to provide support for configurable transactions and the ability to choose the transaction isolation level in the WCF-Custom Send Adapter.
Administration - By continuing to build on the improvements to the BizTalk Management Console made in BizTalk Server 2006 R2, two new query types have been added for tracked message events and tracked service events which consolidates all queries – tracked/archived data, live data and specialized EDI reports, into a single tool.

An online BizTalk Server 2009 roadmap can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/en/us/roadmap.aspx. Here you will find additional detail on features/functions. Oliver Sharp's Q&A reinforces the general principles for BizTalk going forward. http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2008/sep08/09-05BizTalk.mspx

Light up your Sharepoint Applications using the Silverlight .NET Blueprint for Sharepoint on CodePlex

2008-09-10T06:13:00Z

It's time to light up your Sharepoint applications with Silverligt 2.0! On August 19^th, Microsoft released source code for the Silverlight Blueprints for SharePoint—based on the Silverlight Beta 2 release. The Silverlight Blueprints for SharePoint provide a way for developers to better understand how to integrate Silverlight applications with SharePoint. Silverlight has become a popular technology and with the increase in SharePoint adoption there is an increased call for integrating technologies like Silverlight with SharePoint.

In this release, you’ll find five blueprint samples:

1. Hello World

2. Media Player

3. Slider Control

4. Custom Navigation

5. Colleague Viewer

Included in the release are documentation for each of the samples and the source code (go to the Releases tab of the CodePlex site). Also posted to the site is an FAQ document. In the coming days and week, we’ll publish additional screen-casts and any other supporting documentation we create or that is provided to us through the developer community.

The links to get to the Silverlight Blueprints for SharePoint are:

1. http://www.ssblueprints.net/sharepoint/ --or direct at the CodePlex site

2. http://www.codeplex.com/SL4SP

It's time to experience Silverlight 2.0!

2008-02-15T21:46:00Z

Wow, in early February I saw a Silverlight 2.0 demo for consumer engagement in the banking industry. The "eye-candy" value was huge but what really impressed me was the funcationality and ease-of-use provided by the Silverlight controls, meters, buttons, etc. for the end user. It was immediately easy to see the applicability to health plan member portals and other end-user browser based applications.

Silverlight 2.0 provides controls for charts, image sliders and more. SIlverlight 2.0 will enable developers to create apps having:

Richly compelling experiences
Real relevance for business
Interop with ASP.NET and AJAX

You can immediately experience Silverlight 2.0 with a demo created by Infragistics Labs. This exciting demo showcases the future of Web design and development. Experience Silverlight today at IG Labs and visualize all of the great possibilities with Silverlight. More information on Silverlight can be found at www.silverlight.net .

"Pre-Solved Solutions" for .NET/JAVA Interoperability - "...this is progress..."

2007-12-18T03:01:00Z

I like what Microsoft's ESB Guidance kit has done to readily enable and "pre-solve" .NET and JAVA interoperability. I also really like what our partner, JNBridge, has done with their .NET / JMS adatpers for .NET 3.0 and for BizTalk. As one of our customers who has been looking for a clean .NET / JAVA interoperability option said "this is progress". And it really is. The JNBridge solution is based on the .NET Windows Communication Framework and the JNBridge JMS Adapter for .NET enables you to access JMS services from a wide variety of .NET applications. The product JNBridgePro is a Java and .NET interoperability tool that opens up access to the entire object-oriented API from the other side, in the same process or across a network. JNBridgePro is a "pre-solved" interoperability solution! It removes the complexity of cross-platform interop, so that developers can generate solutions quickly (in as little as a day instead of weeks) Go to www.jnbridge.com for more information or contact me directly at hectorr@microsoft.com and I can help you get more information.

Microsoft Provides Full Release of ESB/SOA Guidance Kit based on BizTalk 2006 R2

2007-12-18T02:25:00Z

Microsoft has announced the first full release of our ESB/SOA guidance kit. The Microsoft ESB Guidance extends the functionality of BizTalk Server 2006 R2 to provide a range of new capabilities focused on building robust, connected, service-oriented applications that incorporate itinerary-based service invocation for lightweight service composition, dynamic resolution of endpoints and maps, Web service and WS-* integration, fault management and reporting, and integration with third-party SOA governance solutions. The ESB/SOA guidance kit is a great and quick way to get started with your SOA proof-of-concept, HIPAA re-architecture projects, or other opportunities to continue to enable and automate business process management and workflow within your solution or your health plan organization.

This is the first full release of the Microsoft ESB Guidance. Building on the conent of the earlier community technology preview releases that I had previously mentioned in other blog posts, this new release contains the following key new features:

- New ESB Web services, including the Itinerary and Resolver services

- New samples that demonstrate itinerary processing, UDDI service integration, and the BizTalk Operations and Resolver services; the ESB Management Portal, and an implementation of the Scatter/Gather pattern for Web services

- New core features, such as itinerary processing, centralized event logging, the Exception Management Framework; it also introduces the AmberPoint Embedded Nano Agent for BizTalk Server and the SOA Software Management Point for BizTalk Server.

I strongly encourage everyone using or thinking of using Microsoft's BizTalk Server to immediately download and become acquainted with the first full release of our ESB/SOA guidance kit. This kit is a time-saver that is chock full of working samples and proven guidance. The development of this guidance kit represents extensive investments by Mirosoft and our partners and the pre-configured and "pre-solved" solutions coupled with the working samples make the ESB guidance kit a must have.

Microsoft's BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Provides Robust Support for HIPAA Transaction Processing

2007-12-18T01:23:00Z

Five or six years ago I was involved in some of the original HIPAA solutions architecture projects with some of the largest health plans in the US. At that time the solutions implemented by these plans required extensive effort and investments to fulfill the needs of what I'll call "version 1" of HIPAA transaction compliance. These efforts and architectures involved costly software investments, extensive development and testing time, and the building of large support teams. Given HIPAA's infancy, we can say that these solutions (while not perfect) worked for that time. Now, as I visit with health plans, I am noticing a trend towards re-thinking these solutions in order to support the NPI requirements, the future 5010 transactions, and to also reduce the total cost of ownership of these solutions. Also, as led by the efforts of CAQH/CORE to simplify healthcare administration, health plans are also starting to embrace the notion of "HIPAA Business Simplification". With these thoughts in mind, it's a very good time for (and I strongly urge) health plans to take a very close look at Microsoft's BizTalk Server 2006 R2 as they begin to re-think their HIPAA transaction processing and EDI architectures.

Microsoft's BizTalk Server 2006 R2 not only provides robust support for processing the X12 HIPAA transactions but also provides rich business process management capabilities, flexible and detailed reporting capabilities, a business rules engine, and partner setup and management functionality to enable compliance with HIPAA transactions processing. BizTalk Server 2006 R2 enables health plans to create a powerful foundation to implement a BizTalk Server infrastructure customized to support the requirements of HIPAA. BizTalk Server 2006 R2 EDI Engine includes "in the box" functionality and tools to achieve HIPAA transactional compliance through open standards–based communication and system interoperability.Some key new features in BizTalk Server 2006 R2 that enable HIPAA transaction processing compliance include:

- EDI Engine includes inbuilt support to achieve HIPAA transactional compliance (for example, no need to install an accelerator on top of BizTalk)

- Robust configurable outbound batching of HIPAA transaction sets

- Ability to split incoming Interchange into individual transaction sets, as well as preserve entire incoming Interchange in XML format after validation

- Ability to split large transaction sets (for example, multiple claims) into smaller transaction sets

- Rich Business Reporting functionality to reconcile both technical and functional acknowledgements

Biztalk Server 2006 R2 also enables deep integration with existing line of business applications and interoperability with existing technologies found in health plan IT infrastructures including JAVA, MQ Series, WebSphere, Oracle, Sybase, and DB2. The recent release of Microsoft's ESB/SOA guidance kit and JNBridge's .NET/JMS adpaters provide a great "pre-solved solution" for deep .NET and JAVA interoperability.

More information on the Microsoft Biztalk Server 2006 R2 (Release 2) can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/evaluation/hipaa/default.mspx. Also, you can contact me directly at hectorr@microsoft.com if you'd like to get addtiional information on how to build a HIPAA processing architecture within your organization.

The Updated ESB/SOA Guidance for August 2007 is Here!!!

2007-08-07T20:37:00Z

I mentioned this yesterday after speaking with our Connected Services Division and now here it is. Microsoft's Connected Services Division group, working with the Patterns and Practices group, have updated and released the ESB/SOA guidance kit. You can immediately download (see link below) and use this guidance kit to quickly start your Microsoft based ESB/SOA proof-of-concept and/or project. If you are undertaking an ESB/SOA project using this kit and need additional information please feel free to contact me directly at hectorr@microsoft.com and I'll work with you to get your questions answered.

The August 2007 CTP3 release focuses on the incorporation of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Request-Response Messaging, and the introduction of the Resolver and Adapter Provider Framework. The latter provides the runtime resolution and transformation support to enable both one-way and request-response pure messaging scenarios. The former (specifically the BizTalk WCF adapter) makes it all possible. Hence, key to this release, is the continued refactoring and integration into BizTalk Server 2006 R2—scheduled for release in September 2007. Additionally, we are releasing several infrastructure-based services to support ongoing development work for the ESB Management Portal, as well as for two key SOA Governance partners, Amberpoint and SOA Software.

The newly released August Community (CTP3) build of the ESB Guidance, along with future iterations, can be found at the ESB Guidance community site. If you're using the guidance kit make sure to visit this site each month. I'll try to keep everyone posted on ensuing releases. Also, you should note that the final release for the guidance kit is planned for October 2007.

Microsoft ESB/SOA Guidance Kit - Get on board!

2007-08-07T01:41:00Z

We've spoken about this before and Microsoft's ESB/SOA guidance keeps on getting better. An updated version is due shortly, just in time for the September 2007 launch of BizTalk Server 2006 R2! The ESB/SOA guidance kit can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/solutions/soa/esb.mspx.

The guidance kit is a great evaluation tool to test your ESB/SOA design and technical concepts. It also can jumpstart your ESB/SOA proof-of-concept project and the pre-configured components and test scenarios can save you time and money.

The kit is part of Microsoft's comprehensive ESB offering through its Application Platform including Windows Server 2003, the .NET Framework 3.0, and BizTalk Server 2006. The Application Platform provides an infrastructure that enables the flexible and secure reuse of infrastructure and business services and the ability to orchestrate existing services into new end-to-end business processes. At the core of this solution is BizTalk Server 2006 which provides a basis for common ESB capabilities.

Microsoft's Health Plans Industry Center on MSDN

2007-06-19T21:21:00Z

Great news! Microsoft's Health Plans Industry Center is up and running on the MSDN Industry Center architecture site. The Health Plans Industry Center is a place where you can find architecture guidance and technical material for CIOs, CTOs, Developers and Architects in the Health Plans industry. This industry center covers information relevant to Health Plans, Health Plan service providers, Health Plan solutions providers and consultants and other organizations in the Health Plans industry. Please have a look and let me know if there are any topics you'd like to see us cover.

Hello and Welcome

2007-06-16T01:27:00Z

Hello and welcome to my blog. My name is Hector Rodriguez. I joined Microsoft in 2004 and am currently the Industry Technology Strategist for Health Plans. I focus on working with Microsoft’s health plan customers, partners, product groups, and field resources to understand the Healthcare industry’s current challenges and to formulate end-to-end solution scenarios to address those challenges. I'm here to help and I look forward to interacting with everyone.