NEMUG Newsletter
April, 2002, Articles
March Meeting: EsiOjects - The Movement from M to Object Technology
Over the last 12 years ESI Technology Corporation has worked to evolve M Technology to Object Tecnology. The culmination of that effort has resulted in a highly functional, open source object implementation (EsiObjects) that has formed the basis of ESI's service business. Within the last 5 years ESI has used this technology to build sophisticated middleware and application systems for the Veterans Amdimistation (VA) and Department of Defense (DOD).
At our March 12, 2002 NEMUG meeting Terry Wiechmann, president of ESI, described the projects ESI has prototyped and implemented for the VA and DOD. A quick summary of each of these projects follows.
CIOOT - CPR Interoperability using Object-Oriented Technology Project
In this project EsiObjects was used to wrap very large legacy, M-based, clinical databases (Patient Registration, Radiology, Laboratory, and Pharmacy Results Retrieval) in order to expose them to the enterprise as object properties using TCP/IP, COM, CORBA and Java Gateways. Business rules were extracted, stored in an object repository, and then generated as runtime executable logic.
Neonatal Wireless Project
For this project ESI created wireless communications between EsiObjects and handheld computers using Win CE (COM) and Java Gateway.
GCPR - Government Clinical Patient Record Project
GCPR is a government project with the goal to gather a longitudinal (intergrated) patient record based on patient visits to Indian Health Service, Veterans Affairs, Department of Defense Health Affairs and hospitals around the world and to present it to any provider authorized to view it. ESI built a Clinical Observation Access Service (COAS) server to access clinical observations on the VISTA system (the VA's clinical information system based on M) and pass requested information back to the system that is responsible for integrating the patients record.
VA/DOD Data Sharing Project
The Easy CHCS system will access CHCS and VISTA databases via a common Master Patient Index.
CHCS - Easy Composite Health Care System Project For Navy In this project ESI reused the object wrappers created in the CIOOT (above) project to connect the same databases to a very extensive web browser based front-end created by the Air Force. As a result of the success of this project, the CIO's and Surgeon Generals' of the Army, Navy and Air Force approved moving Easy CHCS into the CHCS program baseline.
Future Projects
Other possible projects include Clerk Scheduling, Surgical Assist, Immunization Tools, Patient Safety and Adverse Event Tracking, Radiology Support, Readiness Tracking and Prevention, Notification and The Virtual Case Manager and Consult Tracking.
~ submitted by Ben Hurley