Where am I?!?

It's been ages.

Every time I sit down to write I end up scribbling some inconsequential nonsense and feel it is not worth publishing (I have exactly 37 entries sitting in here that I have not hit "Publish" on).

Since the last CUI entry I have been to HIMSS in Orlando, returned to Singapore with influenza,  I ended up in hospital for 3 days with a very sick child (my eldest) experiencing the private sector healthcare in Singapore - been back around the region (with 4 days in Hong Kong Disney Land) and am finally back in Singapore working on putting together my HIMSS APAC in May...while preparing for more customer events in between...I think I sleep some time in all that as well...

I've finally managed to get my head above water enough to gasp out a few paragraphs and found that I cannot stop writing! There is just SOOOO much going on right now, it's so exciting I can hardly sleep ... or is it that I don't have time to sleep.

The region I look after for Microsoft - APAC - is undergoing a tremendous period of implementation of fundamental IT infrastructure. We are currently seeing just about every country in APAC implement SOA in healthcare in some way, shape or form. I have been in consultation with all levels of healthcare from large scale public sector through to local clinic owners and GP's. At every front we are finding more acceptance that web services have a role to play in healthcare and that these views are becoming more and more main stream.

Take for instance the Connected Health Framework (CHF) - which is a set of vendor agnostic architectural and design blueprint documents Microsoft has written about our experiences in implementing in healthcare and published for free download. I have been everywhere from India to Japan to New Zealand (and everywhere in between) speaking to people who want to know about it and what it means for healthcare. The really compelling thing in this entire escapade, for me, is the level of interest associates, customers and partners have had in comparing their SOA for healthcare architectures and the one we have published.

Then there is the open source solution we call the Health Connection Engine (HCE). I am currently working on 5 regional implementation projects (from PoC's to Pilots to enterprise deployments). The HCE is a BizTalk-based, web services orientated secure healthcare data exchange originally built by a Microsoft partner in New Zealand (Simpl). This little engine has been downloaded, explored, implemented, adapted and deployed so many times that it is in just about every place I go where BizTalk has been installed.

On top of these is the work being done to further enable and drive commoditization of software in healthcare. I am currently working on enabling Microsoft Word to be a document creator, sender, receiver and editor for healthcare documents using the OOXML standard. In this we are trying to change the way we think of healthcare software by taking a total commodity and adapting it to suit the environment of healthcare more completely. What I am hoping to be able to show with the demonstrator I am working on is that we can encapsulate, create and utilize all types of clinical document structures (CDA, CCD, CCR, local XML) in one structure, thereby overcoming one of the greatest issues we currently face - the use of multiple standards for healthcare documents in a developing document centric environment.

Then there are the Microsoft partners! We have so many partners and so many great things being done that I sometimes loose track. Companies such as OceanInformatics in Australia who have built their solution on our platform for EHR and  Meridian who have a fantastic Obstetrics solutions (and others), who use archetypes as their primary data structural mechanism. K2 and FLowBiz who have human orientated task process engines built on our platform. As well as Dimension Data, Fujitsu, Data*3 and Accenture who implement solutions such as HCE with their customers.

There is just so much going on right now all I know is that things are moving and many things are comming together to make HIT *really* WURK!