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Empowering Healthcare Applications Next-generation healthcare application development framework: tailored to meet industry expectations
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nformatics is rapidly becoming an integrated part of healthcare industry. Today, IT solutions have begun to play an important role in the quality of patient care and profitability of the healthcare institutes. Naturally, the healthcare institutes have started demanding a lot from the IT solutions they use. As far as one can see, the demands of sophistication on the Health IT solutions will only increase with time. While designing the products at 21st Century Health, we had to think long and hard on this important question: we have to base our products on sound design principles so that they will not fall behind the expectations of our industry. What are these principles? The search for an answer led to an architecture that today serves as the basis of out health IT products. Over the years, it was fine tuned more and more as a result of real world experience of implementing our solutions in hospitals, laboratories and diagnostics centers. Today, it has become so integral to our working that we almost take it for granted. The architecture, called health Application Development Framework or HADF, is based on few but strong principles: • Domain oriented programming • Customerization • Interoperability • Modularity
Domain Oriented Programming Creating business software means a lot of programming. Every small possibility in the business process will turn into lines of code. This vast store of code keeps on growing, as we make our software more and more versatile to take care of a multitude of business requirement. What HADF does is to let programmers
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concentrate on the business logic, and takes care of the rest. This way, the programmers can spend their time incorporating more business logic than worrying about technical stuff. This translates into a much quicker delivery of end product than the traditional method. It also means that the application is less prone to errors, since most programming errors come from the technical part of code.
Customerization Whenever a software product is implemented as solution in a healthcare institute, it needs modification to suit the specific practices and policies. In the classical model, this is termed as customization and is usually achieved by coding. Now, whenever you add code to your product you better give it a thorough testing, otherwise you are getting yourself in trouble. This takes long time and increases the lead time for the implementation. Needless to mention, it also involves considerable cost. The designers of HADF kept this as one of their most important objective: it should be possible to customize the product without coding. We coined a new word, Customerization, to represent this approach. HADF enables the implementers of the product to fine tune the product to an amazing extent, to fit the business requirements. Screens, menus,
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fields, outputs, reports, almost every aspect of the product can be adjusted. More importantly, this fine tuning can be done by experts in healthcare, rather than experts in technology.
Interoperability The designers considered the fact that our solution will have to work in conjunction with many other systems in a health institute. In fact, the success of IT in a health institute depends upon how well the different systems talk to each other. To give a few examples, pathology equipments need to talk to lab information system, imaging equipments talk to PACS and RIS, billing systems interact with financial management systems and so on. Transforming Healthcare through People, Processes & Technology Article contributed by 21CHMS. For more information please email: contact@21chms.com or call +91. 98205 24680 www.21chms.com