Health Care, Frameworks, and SOA

It was just the other day that I opportunity to talk to IBM researcher Dan Ford about Big Blue's announcement that it has made available a software technology that can help predict the transmission of diseases across countries and around the globe to the open source community. The tool, known as Spatio-Temporal Epidemiological Modeler, or STEM for short, will help scientists and public health officials understand and plan more efficient responses to health crises. STEM is available for use through the Eclipse Open Healthcare Framework Project (OHF), hosted at the Eclipse Foundation.

Not to be outdone in the overlapping arenas of healthcare and software frameworks, Microsoft has moved forward with its Connected Health Framework for Health Plans, a free, open and extensible reference architecture to help health plans drive out the costs and complexities of interconnecting core systems, service channels, new applications, consumers, devices and business partners and rapidly seize new business opportunities.

Officially launched this week at the America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) Annual Meeting, the blueprint is a "real-world" service-oriented reference architecture that enables health plans and industry solution partners to focus on immediate business problems and apply IT solutions in incremental steps to deliver near-term business results -- regardless of platform or original programming language.

As the first of several building blocks to be released under the Connected Health Framework for Health Plans, Microsoft is also releasing the Consumer Engagement Reference Architecture (CERA) as a stand-alone module. Unhealthy behaviors -- such as smoking, eating poorly and not exercising -- drive up the prevalence of chronic diseases that, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, already affect 30 percent of the U.S. population and account for more than 75 percent of medical costs. The CERA provides health plans with an architecture to proactively and interactively engage consumers in their health within the context of their existing lifestyle at work, home and on the go, making it more natural for consumers to make better informed financial and clinical decisions and self-manage their risks and conditions and health risks.

"Continued IT heterogeneity, combined with healthcare payer market consolidation, has driven increased interest in service-oriented architecture (SOA) in 2007," said Janice Young, program director, Healthcare Payer Research, Health Industry Insights. "A service-oriented architecture strategy provides health plans with a more cost efficient and flexible solution to rationalize business processes across the legacy and heterogeneous platform environment. We believe SOA strategies will play a key role in personalizing and streamlining the external experience between payer, their customers and business partners."

Posted by Jon Erickson at 08:12 AM  Permalink