The WW Health ICT Blog

Microsoft Health Tech Today, with Bill Crounse, M.D.

Connected Health updates

Connected Health Framework – Architecture and Design Blueprint

We have recently released a new version of the Microsoft Connected Health Framework – Architecture and Design Blueprint (CHF-ADB v2).  For those of new who are new to CHF-ADB, it offers a set of vendor-agnostic best practices and guidelines for building the next generation of interoperable e-Health solutions based on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) and industry standards – ranging from within health organizations to regional, national and cross-agency systems. 

CHF-ADB v2 targets lifelong well-being and covers the full continuum of care — from the individual to health professionals, health institutions and payers. Because health is not about just hospitals, CHF-ADB v2 is a full refresh of the initial version released in 2006 that:

· Reflects the actual experience in the use and application of the first edition

· Extends the coverage from healthcare to social care and provide support for lifelong well-being

· Retains the patient-centric nature of the CHF but broaden this to be person-centric by adding a social care dimension and provide additional viewpoints focusing on the needs of families, care professionals, care providers, and the funders of care services

· Extends the guidance for the re-engineering and non-invasive enablement of legacy applications to participate in the service-oriented architecture of the CHF

· Provides more case examples and step-by-step design guidance

You can access the full and summary versions of CHF-ADB v2 from the Microsoft Health IT Industry Center at the link provided below.

Connected Health Platform

As I have indicated in one of the earlier blogs, and as part of an on-going work, we have built a rich set of guidance, tools and solution accelerators as part of our Connected Health Platform that you can use to build enterprise, regional, or national interoperable e-Health infrastructure solutions using Microsoft products and technology aligning with the principles of CHF-ADB v2.

The Connected Health Platform is enabled by the Infrastructure Optimization for Health (IO for Health) model which is built on top of the mature and highly leveraged Infrastructure Optimization Model (IOM).  IO for Health integrates Health IT domain expertise, key learnings from customers, partners and Microsoft field resources from all over the world with IOM.  There are 3 IO for Health perspectives: Core Infrastructure Optimization for Health, Business Productivity Infrastructure Optimization for Health, and Application Platform Optimization for Health:

The following table summarizes the solution accelerators we have available today.  On the Health IT Industry Center at the link above, you will find, in addition to these accelerators, more than 40 architecture, design, and step by step deployment guides.

To insure deep integration with the existing IOM assets, the Connected Health Platform guides, tools and solution accelerators were designed to align with one of the 3 IO for Health perspectives mentioned above.  If we take the Microsoft Common User Interface as an example, the associated guidance, tools and solution accelerators are represented as shown in the following diagram:

For more information on CHF-ADB and the Connected Health Platform, visit the Health IT Industry Center at www.microsoft.com/healthit.  Should you have questions, comments, or suggestions, please use the feedback link on the Health IT Industry Center.  Your feedback is always welcome and much appreciated.

teddy bachour

senior industry technology strategist - ww health

Beta Release of XDS.b Reference Implementation with Async Option

Working in great partnership with iLink Systems healthcare solutions team, we have uploaded a new beta release of our IHE XDS.b Reference Implementation on the Microsoft’s open source project hosting web site CodePlex.

The XDS.b Reference Implementation supports the following transactions/profiles:

-          Provide and Register Document Set-b ITI-41

-          Register Document Set-b ITI-42

-          Registry Stored Query ITI-18

-          Retrieve Document Set ITI-43

-          Patient Identity Feed ITI-44/ITI-8

-          ATNA

The new beta release provides support for the new XDS.b asynchronous web services exchange option and implements the XDS.b related Change Proposals that IHE released during the previous development cycle. 

This beta release has passed pre-Connectathon testing requirements for the IHE North America Connectathon scheduled end of this month. 

We will be updating the CodePlex project with the final release shortly after the IHE North America Connectathon.

The final release will be showcased at the Chicago HIMSS 09 Interoperability Showcase booth in April 09 and the Quebec City e-Health 2009 Interoperability Showcase event in May/June 09.

For more information about the Asynchronous web services exchange option, refer to my September 08 blog on this topic.

The XSD.b beta release project on CodePlex consists of the following components:

-          Documentation:

o   Steps to configure WinBash XDSToolkit

o   Steps to configure TLS

o   XDSb Build and Deployment Guide

-          Source Code:

o   IHE PreConnectathon NA2009 (1)

o   IHE PreConnectathon NA2009 Async (2)

(1)    For the required XDS.b Synchronous Web Services Exchange functionality

(2)    Provides support for the Asynchronous Web Services Exchange option and should be used with the synchronous baseline referenced above.

We look forward to your questions and comments for this release on the CodePlex discussion list.

teddy bachour

senior industry technology strategist, ww health

http://www.microsoft.com/healthit

Why this is a good time to move away from Basic and How we will help you getting there

Health Platform Optimization tool to Accelerate Deployment of Microsoft Technology

Ever since I can remember, when I used to face a complex problem, there was this universal wisdom that invited me to ‘go back to basics’ as a foundation for finding simple solution options to the problem at hand.  This approach has worked for me much more often than not.  The idea behind it is that the complexity of a problem is somehow related to the complexity of the initial assumptions and principles defining the solution domain.

If you have had exposure to our IT infrastructure maturity model (aka Infrastructure Optimization IO model), you may have guessed already where I am going with this.  If you haven’t, I highly recommend that you visit here to see more details about what I am referring to before reading any further.  There is an IT capability maturity assessment survey that you may want to check out while you’re there.  There is also a great white paper entitled ‘Taking the Lead’ that you can access here on this topic.

For now, going back to basics means going back to a good understanding of the current IT capabilities you have in your organization using our Infrastructure Optimization assessment model and tools. This will allow you to define an optimized roadmap to help you reduce cost for deploying and supporting your IT infrastructure and platform, and at the same time improve IT alignment with the business demands.

If you are part of a healthcare organization, and some of your IT capabilities are in Basic stage today, I have double good news for you:

1. Moving these ‘Basic’ IT capabilities to Standardized stage presents a significant cost reduction opportunity for you.  You will find more information about this at the links referenced above.  The IO assessment survey will also provide you with information on cost reduction that is more closely applicable to your environment.

2. We have developed a set of tools (guidance, deployment kits, and solution accelerators) to help you move these IT capabilities to ‘Standardized’ stage.  This is part of the Health Platform Optimization (HPO) guidance we are releasing for our health customers and partners as part of our Connected Health Platform (CHP).  CHP is Microsoft technology offering and prescriptive architecture guidance aligned with the Connected Health Framework - Architecture & Design Blueprint for e-Health solutions built on the Microsoft platform. 

HPO today has more than 40 guidance documents, tools and collaboration solution accelerators for healthcare organizations who want to move from Basic to Standardized to start reducing cost and more closer towards dynamic IT for greater agility and alignment with the business.  HPO aims at helping healthcare organizations to maximize the benefits and reduce the cost of deploying and operating a Microsoft infrastructure and platform in a healthcare environment.

We will be releasing a roadmap providing you with updates on future releases of our guides, tools and solution accelerators covering a wider range of IT capabilities and IT maturity stages such as moving to Rationalized (or Advanced) or to Dynamic stage.  You can access the HPO tool from here.

As always, we ask for your input to help us improve on the HPO tool.  Your comments and feedback are greatly appreciated.

Following are some related links:

- IO for customers: http://www.microsoft.com/optimization

- IO for partners: http://www.microsoftio.com

- WW Health @ Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/health

- WW Health IT @ Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/healthit

teddy bachour

senior industry technology strategist - ww health

The Journey from Patient Safety to Silverlight

You may be wondering what’s in common between these two.  It is called CUI that stands for (Microsoft Health) Common User Interface.

If you have one or more of the scenarios below:

-          You are developing healthcare applications to use in your organization

-          You are building healthcare solutions to sell to your healthcare customers

-          Patient safety, lower development cost, and high quality UI are on top of your mind

You should check the guidance, toolkit, and patient journey demonstrator that we are making available to you to help you achieve your goals.

With the Microsoft Health CUI you can:

·         Interactively browse and download our published Design Guidance documents

·         Interact with our on-line implementations of the Toolkit Controls and Samples that conform to the Design Guidance

·         Download and install the Toolkit controls for use in Microsoft Visual Studio

·         View our new Showcase, which shows how the adoption of the Design Guidance has benefited clinical application and healthcare providers through testimonials, and provides practical and innovative scenarios through demonstrators

·         Access the latest (interactive) Patient Journey Demonstrator, updated with the latest Microsoft Health CUI Silverlight controls

·         Visit the Roadmap, to learn about the Microsoft Health CUI development schedule, the architecture of the Toolkit controls, and the delivery lifecycle used to create the Design Guidance, Toolkit controls and samples

Microsoft Health CUI is one of the health solution accelerators available to you as part of our Connected Health Platform (CHP).  CHP combines Microsoft’s technology offerings, the prescriptive architectural guidance of the Architecture and Design Blueprint, key reference implementations and additional specific guidelines to enable the development of open and extensible e-Health solutions that take advantage of pervasive technologies and serve a broad range of needs.

teddy Bachour

senior industry technology strategist, ww health

Interesting new (asynchronous) capability with XDS.b

Hello everyone!

As some of you may have noticed already, we have recently completed moving our HealthIT content from the MSDN site http://msdn.microsoft.com/health to the new Microsoft in Health Architecture & Technology site at http://www.microsoft.com/industry/healthcare/technology/default.mspx.  The old (msdn) link will become invalid sometime around February 2009.   In the meantime, it will transfer you automatically to the new microsoft.com site. 

Now that we are done with this work, I can resume (or startJ) my blogging activities to update you on some of the great and exciting work we are doing at Microsoft in Health these days.

Great event!

On August 22^nd, IHE released the  Cross Enterprise Document Sharing (XDS.b) Asynchronous Web Services Exchange trial implementation supplement that you can access here.

This means that implementers can now start building support for Asynchronous Web Services Exchange in their XDS.b solutions and prepare their systems for testing at the next Connectathon event in Chicago in February 2009.  Implementers will also have the option to showcase their solutions at the HIMSS Interoperability Showcase in Chicago in April 2009.  Deadline to register for both events is September 30^th, 2008.

Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing XDS.b is a Microsoft Health Information Network (HIN) reference implementation based on the IHE (www.ihe.net) XDS.b integration profile. XDS.b facilitates the registration, distribution and access across health enterprises of patient electronic health records. It provides a standards-based interoperable approach for managing the sharing of documents between any healthcare enterprise, ranging from a private physician office to a clinic to an acute care facility.  XDS.b improves patient safety and staff efficiency by allowing timely access to patient data at the point of care.  The XDS.b reference implementation is also Microsoft Connected Health Platform solution accelerator that is aligned with the architecture principles and guidance of our Connected Health Framework – Architecture and Design Blueprint.

Asynchronous Web Services Exchange is an XDS.b option that adds support for network infrastructures where:

·         Transports are unreliable

·         Systems are not always available

·         Variable or high communication or processing latency is present

Characteristics that are mainly present in cross enterprise, regional, or national infrastructures.  Asynchronous Web Services Exchange enables loosely coupled architecture, which is one of the core tenets of SOA architectures. 

As part of Microsoft Health team commitment to interoperability, we released last year the XDS.b reference implementation for the Document Repository and Registry Actors to the Microsoft project hosting web site www.codeplex.com/ihe. 

We will be updating the XDS.b reference implementation to include this new Asynchronous Web Services Exchange capability and will be posting a new release to the same codeplex site later this year.  You will see a release timeline in the next 2 or 3 weeks.

teddy Bachour

senior industry technology strategist, ww health

Welcome!