Keith Cox - Thoughts and Commentary

Healthcare and ESB at Tech-Ed 2006

Keith Cox — Sat, 10 Jun 2006 22:18:00 GMT

If you're headed to Tech-Ed and have an interest in learning more about real-world implementations of enterprise integration, check out Lukas Cudrigh's presentation on ESB, Wednesday, June 14th. The featured customer implementation, Kaiser Permanente, headquartered in Oakland, CA and operating in 9 states across the United States, is one of the largest integrated healthcare organizations in the country (136,000 employees, Operating Revenues $28 Billion, 8.2 Million members).

ARC311 Building the Next Generation ESB on the Microsoft Platform

Day/Time: Wednesday, June 14 8:30 AM - 9:45 AM Room: 257 AB

Speaker(s): Lukas Cudrigh, Dylan Lewis, Brian Loesgen

Many organizations are considering an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) as a way to improve IT efficiencies and simplify integration efforts. However, there is significant confusion surrounding just what an ESB is. In this session, we discuss how Microsoft has partnered with America's leading integrated health care organization Kaiser Permanente to implement an ESB on the Microsoft platform. We also examine the architecture and design behind this real-world project and discuss how the ESB provides a scalable technology infrastructure for Kaiser Permanente's large-scale SOA implementation.

.NET Framework 3.0

Keith Cox — Sat, 10 Jun 2006 21:56:00 GMT

Take a look at this very recent excerpt and follow the link to Soma Somasegar's blog to learn more about the next .NET Framework:

When speaking to developers about WinFX one question that repeatedly comes up is, “WinFX sounds great, but what happens to .NET?” .NET Framework has becomes the most successful developer platform in the world. Developers know and love .NET. <more>

TechEd06: Delivering on Promises to Enterprise Customers

Keith Cox — Sat, 10 Jun 2006 21:53:00 GMT

Sunday–Friday in Boston, MA, we will host the 14th annual TechEd 2006 conference, our largest annual technical training event for IT pros and developers. More than 11,000 customers and partners will attend, as well as some 250 reporters and analysts. On Sunday, the keynote address to be delivered by Microsoft executives Bob Muglia, Ray Ozzie and Chris Capossela will focus on the Infrastructure for the “People-Ready” Business and how Microsoft will deliver value through four key customer promises. There will also be a number of announcements made throughout the conference from the Server and Tools, Office and MBS divisions.

A More Personalized Approach to Home Healthcare

Keith Cox — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 22:29:00 GMT

There are staggering statistics around the projected shortfall of healthcare providers (doctors and nurses, etc) that will enter the US labor market over the next 10-15 years. To give you an idea of the magnitude, the predicted deficit is in the hundreds of thousands. On the flip side, as we realize this shortage, more and more seniors will enter the market each year who require some type of specialized healthcare. Specifically, predictions are that by 2015, we’ll see 80 million more of these seniors, largely due to the impact of baby-boomers and various other demographic influences.

How we care for this future population is another story.

Using the current care delivery model, we spend a good portion of a provider’s time directly interacting with a patient. This can take the form of a nurse calling a patient on the phone and asking a series of questions to a doctor interacting first hand with a patient in their office. This human-intensive model is expensive, often inefficient and requires the personal attention that the resource predictions mentioned above won’t be able to support.

This can become an interesting story if the efforts of a number of innovative home healthcare and medical device companies have their way.

BodyMedia
BodyMedia designs and builds ‘wearable’ devices that collect, process and present information about an individual’s health and daily routine outside of a clinical setting. Applications for these devices are around weight management, fitness, disease management and research. Imagine being able to “watch” a patient from afar and based on observations provide input into and feedback on their daily activities to improve their plan of care’s effectiveness.

Card Guard
Card Guard specializes in telehealth systems and monitoring services for high-risk and chronically ill patients, including ordinary consumers of health products. Take a look at one of their more interesting offerings that involves the television: Card Guard’s T-Health iTV Healthcare System represents the latest in interactive digital TV, dedicated software and easy-to-use medical accessories for screening, monitoring, diagnosing and managing general consumer health, fitness and illness.

T-Health iTV Monitoring Service features:

Vital signs and symptoms monitoring
Clinical advice and treatment
Educational provision
One on One” Interaction

There have been medical devices assisting us in home healthcare for years – so what makes today’s offerings different? Besides the fundamental advances in technology such as miniaturization, improvements in ergonomics and smarter devices the primary difference is around Internet-connected systems and devices that allow for more timely and relevant data collection, retrieval and analysis.

Another key innovation to notice here is around the ‘personalization’ of the technology and the proximity of the device to the patient. In this case, the ‘wearability’ of devices can more easily permit a patient to be mobile while receiving care. Whether around the house or around the block, different care management plans can be formulated based on the severity of need and the requirements that dictate the individual’s location.

From a business perspective, there’s another dimension - this model scales. You can now automate a broader array of basic tasks that are routine elements of a care management plan. Saves time, resources, people, money. If you can care for or monitor more patients, you can scale the model upward to include larger paying populations in your business plan or target market. If you can leverage a broader and ‘smarter’ array of monitoring products, the model scales outward to increase the breadth of automated services you offer in the home, the office or at the store without increasing the complexity of the data collection process.

For example, imagine of the following scenario:

You wake up in the morning. While you were sleeping, your wearable device collected information about how you slept, your heart rate, respiratory rate and various data points relative to your galvanic skin response. You walk in the bathroom, step on the scale and your weight, heart rate and other indicators are correlated against your last 8 or so hours of diagnostics and a new daily activity regimen is forwarded over your home network to your printer in the kitchen, complete with recommended diet for the day and a note telling you that your caregiver will call you at 3PM to check up on you. All done automatically, connected, secure, and inexpensively – we hope of course.

Where is this heading?

As more and more companies take part in the care management process and more patients (consumers) are placed under their care, new business models will evolve around how to get more into the patients home - or onto their body. There may be less barriers to adoption if the technology is subsidized by the organization managing their care and there may be more services to introduce if overall costs are reduced as a result of the innovation.

Expanding Opportunities in the Global Marketplace" - Los Angeles - April 24-26, 2006

Keith Cox — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 22:11:00 GMT

Sessions examined new thinking on a host of current national and international policy concerns, from energy independence to educating a 21st century work force.

A couple of interesting sessions to check out if you are thinking about purchasing the conference materials on DVD or have them already:

The Future of Health Care
The health-care industry is the largest segment of the global economy, totaling a staggering 4.6 trillion dollars, or 10 percent of world GDP. The cost of health care in the United States constitutes almost half of this figure, at 2 trillion dollars and 16 percent of domestic GDP. And the demand for health care is growing, fueled by an aging population in the developed world and improved living standards in the developing world, noted moderator Michael Milken.

Internet from 10 Feet Away
The Internet is finally emerging as a true entertainment medium. More than half of all homes in the U.S. are now on broadband, the amount of quality content has exploded and we have reliable online video playback technology and better search tools. Just as importantly, there is a business model to support it: free-to-consumer, ad-supported content. And now we are seeing technology, such as Intel's Viiv platform, that can make it work seamlessly on TV. The panel will look at how this trend will change the production, distribution and consumption of entertainment, and how advertisers will fit into this new, on-demand world.

For more information on the Milken Institute, go here.

For more externally published materials such as newsletters, links to other incredible referneces and discussions from the Milken Thinktank, go here and sign-up.

iOra provides advanced replication and offline support for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Keith Cox — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 22:01:00 GMT

iOra’s solution guarantees 100% availability of SharePoint Products and Technologies for users at any location, and reduces network bandwidth costs by up to 99%

15 May 2006, Bellevue, WA - iOra today announced support for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 in iOra’s beta software which will be released later this month. iOra’s long-standing strategic relationship with Microsoft has enabled iOra to deliver a fully integrated solution for SharePoint Server 2007. Global offices can now host replicas of Office SharePoint Server content, allowing users to collaborate on documents at LAN speeds, despite being on different continents. Laptop users can enjoy the same SharePoint Platform experience offline as online. iOra’s Epsilon compression means companies utilizing high-cost WAN, satellite or wireless can dramatically reduce their network infrastructure costs.

In today’s highly competitive global markets, distributed organizations need to automate the processes for sharing information between employees, customers and partners. Centrally implemented SharePoint Server 2007 defines the new standard for enterprise collaboration. iOra extends Microsoft SharePoint functionality to the users on the edges of organizations, by making the same rich interfaces available independently of bandwidth speeds or network connectivity.

“To maximize productivity, today’s information workers need to be able to access information, whether they are online or offline,” said Kurt DelBene, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Office Server Group. “By leveraging the SharePoint Platform, iOra has created a solution that enables customers to access their information when they need it, which in turn allows them to make better-informed decisions.”

iOra’s products provide the broad range of enterprise functionality required by remote and mobile end users. iOra Accelerator replicates web and file based content server to server to support accelerated access for branch office personnel. iOra ON (Offline Networking) allows mobile users to access their web applications when offline. Both products support SharePoint 2003 as well as SharePoint 2007.

“iOra has been privileged to work directly with Microsoft from the first version of Microsoft SharePoint in 2001 to deliver our offline and application acceleration solutions” says Paddy Falls, Chief Technology Officer at iOra. “We have witnessed and benefited from the growth in success of Microsoft SharePoint, which has resulted in iOra’s Microsoft SharePoint revenue growing by over 250% in 2005. We have also witnessed joint large-enterprise customers such as the US Navy and Capgemini use the more advanced features of Microsoft SharePoint version 2 since its release in 2003. SharePoint Server 2007 raises the bar yet again in further streamlining business processes around document and business data. We therefore expect the new release of our software to further accelerate our Microsoft SharePoint-related business.”

About iOra
iOra is a division of Corpora plc. iOra’s patented compression and web virtualization technologies provide accelerated access to web applications and replicate web and file-based content to remote servers and laptops, using only a fraction of the usual bandwidth. By replicating the information and applications to a remote server - or direct to an end user’s hard drive - iOra provides access at LAN speeds or better, even when no network connection exists. iOra solutions are in wide use by both commercial and military organizations.
www.iOra.com