SOA in Healthcare Conference.
January 14, 2011, Sydney, Australia

Agenda

FRIDAY January 14, 2011 - Morning Sessions

Software development is complex. There is a smart way of doing things and there are not so smart ways of doing things. What does that mean? Smart is about doing the right things, the right way - just enough, not too much and getting results quickly. To be smart, you need experience. In this talk, Ivar Jacobson presents a number of smart-cases to demonstrate how smart can be applied when working with people, teams, projects, requirement, architecture, modeling, documentation, testing, process, and more. And of course there are smart ways of doing SOAs.
 

For 25 years, the US Indian Health Service has relied upon a MUMPS-based electronic health record system called the Resource and Patient Management System (RPMS). While RPMS has served our needs well, it has proven to be expensive to maintain, difficult to enhance, and affords our agency very few commercial options to enhance its capability with off-the-shelf products. Further, RPMS was designed to support single facilities and it does not naturally suit itself to the Enterprise-level information sharing that is needed in today's environment with care delivered across care settings and organizations.

IHS is in the process of revisiting our IT infrastructure, and is looking to a SOA-approach and open source implementations as key enablers to help us improve connectivity across the continuum of care and to foster care quality and data consistency within the organization. In doing so, we hope to enable capabilities such as transfer of care and care coordination, and to establish a foundation for improved public health surveillance and management.

This session will talk to the IHS decision process, the rationale by which SOA and Open Source are being selected as enablers, and the considerations, implications, and approach that is being taken by an agency with limited resources to support the needs of a geographically-distributed native population.
 

This presentation will cover the business drivers, functional requirements and business case for adopting an SOA approach for the deployment of the Interoperable EHR (iEHR) in Canada. The presentation will cover the key design principles and highlight some of the explored options and tradeoffs. It will also demonstrate how the system has been successfully extended for new capabilities beyond those originally envisioned.
 

The National Cancer Institute’s (NCI) Cancer Bioinformatics Grid (caBIG) project was launched approximately 7 years ago with the goal of providing an infrastructure that would use contemporary IT tools and technologies to link clinicians, researchers, and patients in the oncology community via a seamless infrastructure, a “World Wide Web for Oncology” that would integrate information and function across the Translational Medicine Continuum, i.e. “from bedside to bench and back.”  As experience was gained, it became clear that a second-generation of caBIG that leveraged maturing SOA frameworks, capabilities, and technologies would substantially increase the value proposition of caBIG for all of its stakeholders, which stemmed the next-generation of caBIG under development since early 2010.  This talk will discuss the general SOA trajectory of caBIG 2 with a particular focus on lessons learned from caBIG 1, the specific value proposition that SOA bring to the effort, and critical issues that a large organization must confront in moving to a large-scale, enterprise-wide SOA that supports both computable semantic interoperability from the perspective of both informational and behavioral semantics.

As organizations make IT investments, the first concerns naturally gravitate to the business value of the investment, the organizational impact that is desired, and the costs associated with acquiring and deploying the technology.  What is often overlooked, however, are the long term impacts of these decisions, particularly if their “fit” in to the organizational fabric and IT landscape are not considered. This session will make discuss why these considerations must be considered as a principal priority, along with core functionality, taking into account system longevity, health data durability, and the changing IT and product environment in which health systems operate. It will introduce healthcare SOA standards that HL7 and OMG have produced, and rationalize why moving to SOA alone isn’t enough.
 

Sari Mckinnon
Director, Solutions & Architecture
MOH Holdings Singapore

This talk will discuss Singapore’s key SOA efforts for its national healthcare initiatives including the US$126 million National Electronic Health Record (NEHR) project. Among the key efforts are a middle-out driven service catalogue to define a common set of business and technical services provided by NEHR, an interoperability architecture to guide the NEHR-provider integration, and a National Health Enterprise Service Bus strategy to facilitate cross-settings SOA governance in the long term. The talk will describe the considerations and challenges of these SOA efforts against the backdrop of delivery constraints such as tight timeline and highly complex integration requirements.
 

Among the most difficult situations most organizations face is to effectively migrate from today’s systems into tomorrow’s.  This interactive session will provide a community forum to interact with speakers from organizations that include very early health IT adopters. 

The session will address audience questions related to technology and culture change, architecture, system development and evolution, and data challenges facing healthcare organizations transitioning from legacy environments.
 

This session explores the use of Model Driven Architecture to produce various implementable artifacts from a single set of models, thus increasing the utility and value of Information Models. Topics include transformation to different platforms, and generation of different materials for different audiences. The motivations behind the Model Driven Health Tools (MDHT) project will be discussed, along with lessons learned from real life experiences in the U.S.

Attendees will learn what Information Models are, why they are needed in both SOA and in Healthcare IT Standards development, how they are built, and how Model Driven Architecture is used to improve the utility of these models. Attendees will also learn about some real-world successes and obstacles in the development and use of such models.
 

The Common Terminology Services Edition 2 (CTS2) RFP focuses on the need for a common interface that enables dissemination, update and querying of a broad spectrum of terminological resources. It focuses on a shared model and API that allows arbitrary collections of code lists, thesauri, classifications, ontologies, to be utilized as a homogenous, federated resource.

This particular session will focus on the design and architecture of Common Terminology Services 2 (CTS2) submission to the Object Management Group.  It will describe how the CTS2 Platform Independent Model (PIM) bridges the world of structured terminology models such as those represented in HL7 and IHTSDO with the subject-predicate-object triples of the Semantic Web, and how these models are structured in a way that enables interoperable platform specific models (PSMs) based on REST, SOAP as well as finer grained APIs.
 

This presentation will present how the HL7 Service Aware Interoperability Framework (SAIF) might be used to specify services and then how services can be used within a SAIF interoperability Specification. The Service-Aware Interoperability Framework (SAIF) can be used to create and manage easy-to-use, traceable, consistent and coherent Interoperability Specifications (ISs) regardless of the message, document or service interoperability-paradigm. The SAIF focus is on managing and specifying artifacts that explicitly express the characteristics of software components that affect interoperability. This session will present one approach, based upon SAIF, to organize and manage architectural complexity and the interworking associated with information exchanges and service interactions for distributed environments.
 

The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is a formal, standardized language that provides both a standard visualization mechanism and a formal mapping for executable BPM systems. Learn how to leverage BPMN to better understand the wealth of information and services which underpin the business goals of today's organizations.
 

SoaML (Service oriented architecture Modeling Language) is a new standard for modeling and design of services within service-oriented architectures. This tutorial will provide a brief comparison between SoaML, BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) and 'generic' UML (Unified Modeling Language), and present an overview of SoaML together with practical examples of modeling services using SoaML.