Off the Rocker in November

We are lucky to get Clayton Curtis MD PhD, the VHA-IHS Interagency Liaison & Enterprise Architecture and M programmer discussing "The Next Generation of Healthcare Systems at the VA". Later we hope to have a WorldVista presentation put together by Rick Marshall to explore the open source market of M that came out of the VA.

January 31, 2006 NOTE CHANGE OF DATE. We hope to invite out of town folks who are interested in doing a presentation about Trackware at NEMUG. (the website is http://www.gware.com/). There is a Finnish connection and Trackware designed to address the version control requirements of Ensemble productions and environments.

March 14, 2006 Ken Wagner of Henry Elliott and Company, Inc (http://www.henryelliottandco.com/) will spean on "The State of the M/Caché Industry for Hiring and Consultants. How Restructuring Factors in the Growth of the Industry"

March 26 - 29, 2006 NEMUG presence at the InterSystems’ DEVCON 2006, Rancho Mirage, CA

May 9, 2006 DEVCON recap Spring 2006, Saturday School, you can mail in suggestions for needs or interests. Use the To sign up to http://mail.intersystems.com/mailman/listinfo/nemug-news or email nemug-news@mail.intersystems.com. As usual we are interested in your wishes/desires/needs.

We always would like to see ideas for speakers or links to speakers.

We are still looking for pictures for a CD on the April 9 reunion.

November speaker, Clayton Curtis

Clayton Curtis MD PhD Dr. Curtis is project manager of VHA-IHS interagency liaison for clinical information systems technology and a member of the VHA Enterprise Architecture team. His focus is on sustainable collaboration between VHA and IHS, and facilitation of IHS migration to VHA's Computer Patient Record System (CPRS). Dr. Curtis maintains a part-time practice in the Women Veterans Health Center at the Jamaica Plain campus of the Boston Healthcare System. From 4/98 to 6/04 he was Director of Clinical Informatics for VHA's New England Healthcare Network (VISN 1), reporting to the VISN Chief Information Officer. Major projects included CPRS and VistA Imaging deployments, WebTop, and development of EMR standards for VA New England. From 7/96 to 4/98 he was Chief Information Systems Architect for VHA, working in OCIO. From 7/94 to 7/96 he chaired the Clinical Application Requirements Group, which was responsible for defining functional requirements for clinical applications in the Veterans Health Administration and developing plans for progressing to a computer-based patient record. Dr. Curtis was also a principal architect of the Clinical Information Resources Network (CIRN) project to deliver a shareable, multi-facility clinical database for VHA's regionalized health care networks. Dr. Curtis received his undergraduate degree in engineering from Case- Western Reserve University and his MD and PhD (in Management Information Systems) from the University of Arizona. Dr. Curtis joined VHA in 1994 after 22 years in the U. S. Public Health Service, the last 15 as a primary care physician and clinical software developer with the Indian Health Service.

September meeting notes:

Mike LaRocca came up from New York to give us his viewpoint of the evolution and architecture of Ensemble, the new EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) product from InterSystems.

Case Studies

In a business environment that is moving towards an integration, Ensemble has evolved to monitor business process and messaging. Ensemble adapters interact with the wide-ranging functions and bring them into one central application. Several case studies show the range of Ensemble configurations. One was a healthcare database with all of the types of data required in that industry. Another demonstrated Extract Transform and Load (ETL) at a financial institution. The Florida state government brought together many different types of application into a single view of them all. When a child got lost in the system, they felt it was important to link the counties’ databases. Some use MS, some DB2, Oracle, SQL and others. At Petrobras, Brazil, a composite application is in place at the $30 billion Brazilian petroleum corporation. At another company, who needed to tailor car loans for individuals at various sites, Ensemble reduced the need for on site customizations by 70%.

Ensemble also can be used to build PIPs (Packaged Integrating Processes), or reusable business processes. A PIP is an “application” at the integration level, coined by Gartner. If you’ve implemented, say, the integration of the 5 different applications a particular bank has, then you went and did this again for a different bank, etc., after a while you’d notice that maybe 70% of the code in each of these projects is the same, so if you could package that portion of the integration code and sell it separately, that would be a PIP. One PIP might be a credit checker and could be separated out and sold to credit unions. Ensemble is good for business activity monitoring (BAM), real time business intelligence, by defining specific “metric” objects that are automatically collected and displayed. Architecture Ensemble includes Business Process Management, the portals, the messaging subsystem, and the application. It is consistent, makes sense, easy to deploy, an award winning way to integrate heterogeneous databases and applications. Business rules can be used to generate a standard process with default values that can be changed by the customer. There is a tool to display visual trace of message, using browser SVG (Structured Vector Graphics) technology for the visual (a free SVG viewer is available from Adobe, and FireFox also supports it natively). For business metric, there are various graphics with dashboard, gauges, etc.

Roadmap

The 12-month roadmap of Ensemble features HL7 support and other enhancements. HL7 is an ANSI standard for healthcare specific data exchange between computer applications. X12, a standard for defining Electronic Data Interchange used primarily in business, is coming. Improvements on a message interface would be developed on one tool set. MAC will be supported. Demonstration LaRocca did a live demonstration of a simple on-line shopping application built already, for a training class. Class definitions are the same in Caché and Ensemble. For those used to Caché it will be very familiar. Caché can create the global structure. In Ensemble, class definitions, all internal code is generated when compiled, repository for indexes. It is called BPL or Business Process Language editor in Studio. There is not much code writing in Ensemble.

Mike started up a production and showed the processes that take place. He looked at some products for sale in the on-line store. He showed how a message browser listed every lookup, every activity by a user. He can use the ODBC driver to query Cache and return real time data and update inventory, track when inventory is getting low, submit an order for more. Mike showed how the application kept track of business rules applied. The user can change defaults that come with the system and view how they were applied. For example, orders over a certain number might get a certain discount. An “if” condition might apply for example in a huge order, an outstanding task might require user intervention to verify the order. The trace function shows a timeline of the event. There are various logs for the different application events, a business rule log, to show when rules were invoked, a message log. You can resend messages. You need credentials, to log in. Multiple actors can work on various aspects. Next he built an interface routine engine including Inbound and outbound data transformation of HL7 messages. He added a new project, configurations, services, operations. Raw definitions come up as a default, but you can override the values.

The presentation showed how development was quick and required little coding, although he demonstrated where to find code in the background. It is possible to write the same application using code it as well. It was a wide ranging talk from history and general to the very concrete and hands-on. We are looking forward to deeper investigations into the various aspects of Ensemble in the future.