NEMUG Newsletter
October, 2002, Articles
From The Chair
The NEMUG Board has been busy making plans for this year, and we want to share our ideas with all the membership. At their request, I am inaugurating here what will be an occasional column highlighting coming events. For this first edition, I'd like to tell you about three events:
- NEXT MEETING (November).
Many of us have been to presentations from InterSystems that show how Cache Objects work, but if your experience has been like mine, you've noticed that the demonstrations created new Objects using Cache's default global structures. At our November 12th meeting, the focus is on your systems. Our speaker will take existing globals and map them as Objects in Cache, demonstrating the power that Objects can release to existing systems. We are excited about this topic, and hope it will be as useful to you as we anticipate. Please bring along any global structures that you would like to see mapped, and we'll use as many as time permits. We are providing some globals in advance, and expect this to be a very interesting evening.
- Beat the mid-winter blues with a NEMUG DINNER!
We plan to hold a dinner meeting in January and have a bang-up speaker for you. We have held these dinners in September in the past, but have not done one for several years, so now seemed the right time. We will need to know how many will be able to attend, in order to plan the location and menu. If you are interested in attending, please let a board member know. Feel free to email me at mdpaterno@partners.org. We will send out more information as it becomes available. Gardner Trask is working on finding a good restaurant or hotel. NEMUG plans to absorb the cost of this event ourselves, so don't let funds get in your way. The date for the event will be Tuesday, January 14, 2003. Mark your calendars now and plan to join us!
- SATURDAY SCHOOL
The last time we held a Saturday learning event, it was well received, and we plan to do it again in the spring, most likely late March or early April. The topic will be CSP and HTML (no Objects needed). More details will be forthcoming in the newsletter and on the web site, so stay tuned! If you have suggestions for other topics, please let any board member know.
We are working on a variety of interesting topics and speakers for coming meetings. Among the ideas we are pursuing are presentations from large users of M, some in the healthcare field, and some not. In the area of interconnectivity, we are looking at topics related to new computer technology. Each year we have dedicated a meeting after InterSystems' DEVCON conference to a review of that event, and are looking at doing that again. Please let us know which of these ideas interest you, which do not, and pass on to us anything that you would like to see us address at the general meetings.
NEMUG is your organization, and to that end we on the Executive Board want to provide you with meetings, educational events, and information that will be useful to you in your work with M. Let us know of anything that we can do to maximize NEMUG's positive influence in your work.
Marilyn D. Paterno, Chair
September Meeting: An Open and Secure Mobile Platform for Healthcare Patient Safety Initiatives
Jeff Sutherland, PhD. Chief Technology Officer of Patient Keeper Corporation presented PatientKeeper - an open and secure mobile platform for heathcare patient safety initiatives.
PatientKeeper utilizes an open, mobile platform to empower healthcare providers to capitalize on the potential of mobile technology to save lives, time, and money. PatientKeeper is committed to an open architecture and universal platform for mobile healthcare computing, enabling independently authored applications to be integrated seamlessly on one handheld device.
PatientKeeper integrates disparate mobile applications, disparate mobile devices, disparate mobile initiatives, and disparate hospital information systems. PatientKeeper is currently used by leading hospitals, premier HIS companies, and over 45,000 clinicians. PatientKeeper's Mobilizer Platform features an open architecture designed to allow third- party developers and technology partners to create new applications and functionality. In conjunction with their Software Development Kits, the architecture provides the foundation for developers to create applications that:
- Share a common patient list (Mobile Patient Index)
- Utilize an inter-application framework (IAF) for message passing
- Connect to their Mobilizer connectivity server
- Interface with legacy healthcare information system
The Platform is designed to allow handhelds to communicate with enterprise servers via various modalities, including cradle, infrared, and wireless transport (e.g., 802.11b, CDMA, Bluetooth, and others).
The Mobile Patient Index (mPI) is the single view that brings together the full suite of PatientKeeper's handheld applications, which include:
- LabKeeper: which allows providers to receive lab results at the point of care.
- AlertKeeper: an automated messaging application that allows providers to get important information about patients during the course of the workday.
- DxKeeper: which allows providers to automatically maintain up-to-date problem lists for each patient in the Mobile Patient Index (mPI).
- ChargeKeeper: which allows providers to use a handheld to interface with the hospital's admission/discharge/transfer (ADT) system and patient scheduling system.
- MemoKeeper: which allows providers to store important patient information for personal use, or post to a patient's "chart" as a "sticky note" for other users to view.
PatientKeeper Personal, a handheld patient management tool is available on a free trial basis at PatientKeeper web site, www.patientkeeper.com.
Some of Dr. Sutherland's presentation slides are available in the form of a PowerPoint presentation on NEMUG's web site. More details on Patient Keeper can be obtained on their web site at www.patientkeeper.com.
~ submitted by Ben Hurley