Jan 10 meeting NEMUG Gathering, Jan 31 meeting TrackWare, Off the Rocker, upcoming meetings, VA Talk Summary from November
Note: Change of location to second floor (follow signs) in the Wellesley Gateway Bldg, at Exit 20 of Rte 95(128) at Rte 9.
Directions to 93 Worcester Rd, Wellesley, MA
10 January 2006, 2nd Tuesday: First Gathering
NEMUG Training
On January 10th we'd like to discuss NEMUG's role in educating its membership. A proposal was made at the last board meeting for NEMUG to sponsor a Cache' development course. This course would meet once a week for 2 to 3 hours and would have class assignments similar to a college course (yes, homework.) We discussed the course lasting for various numbers of weeks. Some proposed a full 15 week course, and others thought shorter durations were more appropriate.
We'd like your opinion on this topic. Should NEMUG sponsor training? If we did, what kind of training should it be? Does a college like course make sense?
We'll see you on January 10th.
31 January 2006, 5th Tuesday, Speaker Meeting TrackWare, Version Control of Caché
The speaker will be Jorma Sinnamo, CEO of GlobalWare Corporation. Elizabeth Harding will be present too. Jorma worked in Boston in the 80s and 90s and may be known to some of your members as he was pretty involved with the NEMUG at the beginning, and also the old M standards committee. Having worked in M and Caché in the field of software configuration management for a long time, he is very knowledgeable about the subject. Jorma will mostly be speaking about our TrackWare Professional product and how it relates to today's development environments. Globalware Corp. are about to release a major new version of Professional which offers version control and configuration management functionality to support both Caché (and M) and non-Caché development, and it has some interesting new features.
January 10, 2006
Here is your chance to do some networking. So many of you have said that connecting
with other programmers is a major reason why you belong to NEMUG. Come to this
more casual meeting and join in the discussion. Help us guide the future of
NEMUG with exciting and relevant strategies. "Heavy" snacks will be
served.
January 31, 2006 - TrackWare, version control of Cache.
March 14, 2006 - Ken Wagner of Henry Elliot and Company to talk about the job marketplace.
March 25-29, 2006 - Intersystems DEVCON, NEMUG presence.
May 9, 2006, DEVCON recap, slate of next year's officers presented.
Let's hear some ideas for future meeting. Others have suggested:
" IT consolidation
" IT management enabling technologies
" Dot Net interworking
" Query optimization, investing, cappuccino
VA Summary Talk from 9 November 2005 Meeting with Clayton Curtis
Clayton Curtis’s talk was riveting and controversial if not cheerful to MUMPS programmers.
The Veteran’s Administration (VA) is like a whale or oil tanker that gets going in one direction and it is hard to change. They use VISTA (Veterans’ Information System Technology and Architecture.
The VA's CPRS or computer patient record system has an MPI or master patient index. They process 576,000 documents and 922,000 patient orders every day. CPRS success has been measured in continuum of care, the availability of records which are legible if not intelligible. Its not about technology, it is about results. For example, after Katrina the computer room of the VA hospital in New Orleans was submerged. Both inpatients and outpatients were distributed to others VA hospitals. They recovered using their All Emergency response. A Hewlett Packard team was dispatched through September 1. New Orleans backup was replicated in Houston on Fri 9/2 and all records restored. Biloxi was reconnected to national grid by satellite. It took 100 hours to restore EMR capability for all affected facilities. Data was all backed up off site. That is their SOP, or Standard Operating Procedure. Radiology records lost, but they have changed SOP for that.
To modernize, they need to shift from facility centered to a patient centered service. Data need to be more standardized across facilities. They need more flexibility.
The VA uses an aging, legacy system. They are unable to integrate effectively. They have unacceptably high maintenance costs. There are fewer MUMPS programmers up and coming out of schools. Plus another force is broad federal initiatives that point them in a different direction.
The plan is to starting from a clean slate, destroying the old. The new system is called HealtheVet-VistA. All will be changed, the platform, the software design, development and business processes. In 5 to12 years they will be moved out of M. They are migrating to COOP, Continuity of They need to maintain operations, in face of disasters. They want to build on the existing foundation, collaboratively to deploy in stages. They will maintain publicly owned freely distributable software.
Their goals are for extensibility, to avoid dependence on vendors and technology, to provide strong business intelligence, and build security certification into software, not retrospectively
As an Information Model they are shifting to Service Oriented Architecture. That includes chunks of code that can be separated out. They will use J2DD1.3 for development environment, Oracle 10g for national databases, Caché 5.1 for local databases, for relational databases. There will be no new MUMPS code. Alternatives include Access, Excel, Vitria Business Ware 4.2 for message transport, HL7 2.4/XML for message format and Linux as an operating System.
They will have a national Health Data Repository. This helps if patient moves and for statistical analysis. The Department of Defense (DOD) has one database. After 5 yrs they are 1/3 of the way to the end.
VHA is first standardizing all the data first. Pilots are started, with the establishment of data centers and the migration of non critical centers.
This product will be service oriented, object oriented. It will use Java and J2EE. Developers will need to know Java, Swing, Struts, Enterprise Java Beans, XML, JDBC, etc. They will use approved tools. Many are open source. For example they will use developer tools, modeling and UML. There will be a business logic tier, a presentation tier and a data access layer. It will be a model driven architecture, that is design before code. VHIM, Veterans Health Information Model, will use messages to exchange data. Messaging will be the backbone.
There are risks. With technical complexity, project management, and congress there will be more people and with more people, the worse the communication. However, Congress mandated VA to reorganize their IT. Congress will Withhold HEV funding until VA restructures budget authority and accountability. They lost 57 programmers due to the budget cut. There is a budget shortfall due to Katrina and Iraq. Congress is forcing them to have an IT line item budget. Up to now the expenses have just been spent to keep patient care high.
What will happen? Will we change or stay the same? Clayton had no easy answers.