ICW - Technology for Health

ICW Developer Conference 2009 Sessions

The conference has three parallel tracks:

• Partner
• eHealth Infrastructure
• Integration and Standards

Partner Track

ICW Partner Guides: A Whole New Perspective on ICW for our Partners

This presentation first addresses the perspective of a partner: why engage with ICW ? What benefits do I have from leveraging ICW technologies? How can we create win-win scenarios? What resources and what services does ICW offer to help me get started? This is where the ICW Partner Guides come into play.

In the second part of this talk, the eHealth Framework (eHF) is introduced from a technical perspective, followed by an introduction to the eHF Partner Guide, along with examples on where the eHF is being used today both inside and outside ICW.

The final part addresses the open source strategy for the eHF and its relation to the Open eHealth Foundation and puts this into perspective with our overall focus on both partners and the open source community at large.

eHF Partner Guide, LifeSensor Partner Guide - Developing Software with eHF and LifeSensor

The eHF and the LifeSensor Partner Guide are the first manifestation of the ICW Partner Guide Concept. They have been developed both as proof-of-concept and to illustrate the concept inside ICW and beyond to pilot partners. The eHF Partner Guide has been leveraged to a product creating more and more interests and represents a milestone concerning the partner strategy of ICW.

In the session the technical use cases are described as building blocks to developing software with eHF. The LifeSensor partner guides adds further specific building blocks on top of eHF and creates further business opportunities for partners.

The session is a prominent pillar of the plenary session. Make sure you don't miss it!

The DFB Project - Managing the Data for the German National Soccer Team with the eHF

In cooperation with DFBmedien ICW currently extends the DFBnet, a web based application that gives trainers and managers of the german soccer association access to data of all games and players. The extension is an architecturally separated but visually seamlessly integrated application that hosts the particular sensitive performance and health data of the players. Enhanced security requirements of this application are the reason why ICW's know-how and technology was chosen.

The implementation of the application is based on ICW's eHealth Framework (eHF). This presentation will give an insight on how the application developers benefited from the eHF during implementation of this solution. A live demo of the application will be given.

eHF Against Cancer

Pancreas-Cancer-Registry Prototype Developed by the Software Master Class.

The Software Master Class is part of the university cooperation between ICW and the study program "Medical Informatics"  run jointly by the University of Heidelberg and Heilbronn University. It is a special seminar on software engineering that is offered once a year to exceptional students, who have displayed excellent software development skills throughout their studies.

The Pancreas-Cancer-Registry is a specialized cancer registry that will be built by the University Hospital of Heidelberg along with other University Hospitals. The purpose of the registry is the collection of patient data to enhance cancer treatment and research for that specific kind of cancer. The mortality rate for pancreas cancer is extremely high and the amount of available data about cancer therapies rather small.

For this real life project the students developed a proof of concept application based on the eHF as the development and application platform. In due course a separate therapy module and a web GUI were developed. The development of the therapy module was model-driven with the eHF Generator. The web GUI makes use of the Google Web Toolkit (GWT). This presentation provides a detailed outline which eHF components were used, which of the parts were custom made and the architectural composition of the solution.

Coventry Just-In-Time Telemonitoring and Intel Health Guide integration using ICW IPF

Coventry Healthcare is one of the leading healthcare insurance providers in US. The Coventry Just-In-Time project is an example of providing a tele-monitoring solution, created using the ICW's Open eHealth Integration Platform.

The scope of the Just-In-Time project included outfitting select chronic heart failure patients with an RTX Gateway paired with an A & D Medical Bluetooth weight scale. The patients were required to take weight readings on a daily basis and answer questions on the RTX Gateway. The RTX Gateway communicates with ICW's Device Connectivity Server (DCS), which sends custom translated data to Navigator Care, Coventry's care management application. The Just-In-Time solution provides valuable information on the weight and patient's self-reported condition for Coventry's monitoring nurses.

The ICW DCS relies on the Open eHealth Integration Framework and in this presentation we will explain how the cross-functioning teams, ICW Labs USA, PRG development and professional services, worked together to custom tailor the solution.

In this presentation we would also like to share learned lessons, RTX scripting for questionnaire workflow and ICW Labs involvement in integration testing of the solution.

Midday Plenary: ICW Partner Guides in Action

Jochen Kohler, Alexander Duda, Borislav Tonchev, Rostislav Georgiev, Christian Seufert, Jens Riemschneider, Christian Lindmayer, Thorsten Kampp, Karsten Klein.

The midday plenary integrates what has been presented in the morning in a unique continuous live demonstration of the ICW technolgy platform. It is held as moderated session, which connects the technologies and people from four different organization units of  ICW.

The demonstration is structured in five main elements, which directly map to technical use cases of the respective partner guides. You will see the eHF, the LifeSensor and the ACF Partner Guide in action. Additionally the open source Integration Platform (IPF) - which was contributed to the Open eHealth Foundation at the end of 2008 - will be shown in the context of eHF.

eHealth Infrastructure Track

The ICW Software Development Kit (SDK)

An introduction into the ICW SDK Module Standard. For easy integration of source systems with ICW products. It incorporates a programing interface (API) that can be used by different programing languages via Microsoft COM or NET, or Java technology. The SDK primarily facilitates creating, sending, and receiving data that is exchanged between the source systems and the ICW system, such as an ePrescription or the medication information. The object-oriented API enables source system manufacturers to access ICW products through their standard development environment. At the same time, the SDK ensures greater independence if interfaces change, it is often sufficient to only update the SDK. In these cases, the interface to the source system usually remains unchanged.

The ICW API Composite Framework - Your SDK Factory

Software vendors, whose success depends on having their system integrated in many other independent client applications, are faced with the challenge to support their partners to ease the integration. The actual goal is to leverage the partners to minimize their integration effort and to increase the quality of the integration.

If you only deliver technical protocol definitions (e.g. in WSDL) together with a documentation to your partners, the developer is occupied with all the technical aspects like data transmission or security, instead of only concentrating on the actual business use cases. This situation can be improved by delivering a SDK, including libraries which encapsulate and abstract the technical aspects and exposing a use case oriented business view. Implementing only one library is not enough, because the partner clients can be based on different platforms. Thus many kinds of libraries suitable for different target platforms have to be created. In order to minimize the support, training and documentation effort the APIs of the different libraries have to be consistent.

The ICW API Composite Framework (ACF) is built up to cope with all these challenges. It offers the possibility to design a domain specific API in abstract platform independent models. Based on these models the ACF is able to generate different SDK artifacts like the complete API Layers for the different platforms. But the ACF is more than a generator. It also defines which artifacts you need for a SDK, creates them, handles their dependencies and finally packages them to a deliverable for the integration partners. This session introduces you to the concepts and structure of the ACF. Finally, a live demo shows how a SDK can be created using the ACF.

The ICW eHealth Infrastructure in Practice - Migrating to a Second Generation eHealth Network

The establishment of an eHealth Infrastructure is the foundation for an integrated healthcare IT ecosystem. This talk shows the building blocks of an eHealth Infrastructure and demonstrates how ICW's eHI Solution facilitates the migration of an existing network to a new technology platform, streamlining system integration and manageability.

It also provides background information about the challenges of operating a nationwide eHealth network with a great variety of integration and service partners and how the eHI Solution deals with these challenges.

Management Decision Support for Hospitals and Hospital Chains

This presentation gives an insight view into the concept, usage and implementation on ICW Health Intelligence and Analytics. Based on a real customer scenario it is shown how HIA helps clinical managers to combine information from different sources. The out of the box available analytical reporting give managers confidence in their decisions. In addition the way how to implement customer specific extensions and the way who to implement them under consideration of a local partner will be shown and discussed.

Software Productline Engineering with OSGI Applied

OSGi can be considered as the first real componentization technology in Java. As such, many companies are starting to build modular application based on it. However, as with any other unfamiliar technology one is faced with problems that seem not to have an obvious solution at first glance.

In this talk, we will show how we at ICWs eHI are using OSGi to build our software product line that is our vehicle to tackle typical software development in a project based environment. We are going to cover our strategies to define, build and maintain our core components, extensions and the project specific domain applications that we build on top of our main software stack. As a main focus, we will point out strategies to leverage loose coupling and high cohesion as well as conceptual abstractions we introduced to maintain software products with several hundred bundles, that are not only maintainable but also easy to reuse and to document.

As an example we will point out how we create truly dynamic web applications where bundles contribute pages to the web UI and can be added and removed on the fly, as well as a work flow system that provides a declarative mechanism for specifying complex operations based on many activities contributed by different bundles. The problem of testing the various combinations, the mix and match of bundles in product lines will be another topic we are going to touch. As a last point we show how the software development cycle is implemented at ICW to ensure code quality and release stability in terms of the software itself and the published APIs we provide for our customers. At the end of the presentation the audience will have valuable insight on how to deploy a software development methodology based on OSGi that is agile and propels the modularization of OSGi at its best.

Integration and Standards Track

The Open eHealth Integration Platform - Part I & II

The Open eHealth Integration Platform (IPF) is an extension of the Apache Camel routing and mediation engine. IPF has been open-sourced in November 2008. It has an application programming layer based on the Groovy programming language and comes with comprehensive support for message processing and connecting systems in the eHealth domain.

IPF provides domain-specific languages (DSLs) for implementing Enterprise Integration Patterns. Applications may define their own DSL extensions by means of Groovy meta-programming. Deployment options range from small-scale embedded deployments up to large-scale clustered deployments for both, normal Java applications as well as in OSGi environments.

This talk starts with an overview of IPF and then demonstrates how to develop an IPF application that is based on the Groovy programming layer and deployed to an OSGi environment. OSGi-specific design considerations for supporting dynamic updates are thoroughly discussed. Future directions such as providing 'IPF as a Service' are presented as well.

The Open eHealth Integration Platform Services

The Open eHealth Integration Platform (IPF) enables comprehensive support for message processing and connecting systems in the eHealth domain.

IPF services such as the 'flow manager' and the 'large binary store' provide means to improve the quality of application services and allow administrators to monitor message flows and recover from failures. The 'audit and event infrastructure' unifies system and application event handling and provides a basis e.g. for auditing or complex event processing. 

This talk gives an overview of these IPF services and demonstrates how to include them into IPF applications via IPF's domain-specific language (DSL) support.

HealthCare Interoperability Standards

In the world of the health information exchange, the use of appropriate standards is critical and must be an integral part of any product planning, design and implementation. While standards in health IT have been around for quite some time (e.g. HL7), they have failed to deliver on the promise of interoperability because of the lack of proper use cases, "proprietary" standards and simply because of healthcare IT vendors' unwillingness to share data.

Over the past 5 to 10 years, many factors - such as spiraling costs, the search for improved quality of care, mandates and incentives from the government, as well as a push from patients themselves - have pushed the healthcare industry to look for a better way to address the fragmentation of health information systems.

Several initiatives have been created to address these interoperability challenges. Private organizations such as Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE), and public entities such as the Health Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP), are among the influential organizations which are applying existing, well-established communication, integration and information exchange standards to enable plug-and-play interoperability.

This presentation will highlight the latest developments in health IT standards around the world, what is different about IHE profiles and HITSP specifications and why it might work this time, what ICW has been doing in terms of adoption and contributions, and what ICW plans to do next with regards to providing developers and partners the tools they need to standardize their products.

Using HL7 Processing Capabilities of the Open eHealth Integration Platform in the Implementation of IHE Profiles

The Open eHealth Integration Platform (IPF) is an extension of the Apache Camel routing and mediation engine. IPF was open-sourced in November 2008. It has an application programming layer based on the Groovy programming language and comes with comprehensive support for message processing and connecting systems in the eHealth domain.

The HL7 version 2 standard has the aim to support hospital workflows and defines a series of electronic messages to support administrative, logistical, financial as well as clinical processes. HL7's v2.x messaging standard is supported by every major medical information systems vendor.

HL7 2.x is also utilized by the interoperability initiative Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE). IHE is an association of healthcare professionals and industry to improve the way computer systems in healthcare share information. IHE promotes the coordinated use of established standards such as HL7 or DICOM to address specific clinical needs in support of optimal patient care. Systems developed in accordance with IHE communicate with one another better, are easier to implement, and enable care providers to use information more effectively.

In the first part of the talk we demonstrate the HL7 messaging capabilities of IPF. We will show how HL7 version 2 message processing is done via IPF's HL7 DSL and via HL7-specific extensions, including parsing, rendering, transformation and validation.

In the second part of the talk we focus on a specific project, the implementation of an HL7 2.x based message interface that is compliant with the the IHE integration profiles PIX (Patient Identifier Cross-Reference) and PDQ (Patient Demographics Query). We show how use of the IPF's HL7 DSL facilitates the implementation. Additionally, we give an overview of the general IHE process and share our experience of being a part of it as a participating vendor.

Finally we will give an outlook on how IPF's HL7 support will also cover HL7 version 3, particularly with regard to the RIM (Reference Information Model, ISO 27931) and CDA (Clinical Document Architecture, ISO 10781) standards. These features will lower the bar for supporting IHE profiles based on HL7 Version 3 messages and CDA documents, such as PIX/PDQ V3 or XPHR.

Exchange Semantics with the Terminology Server

For the exchange of meaningful messages between communication partners, they need to agree on a common terminology. Such a common terminology defined by a controlled vocabulary is one of the key assets for semantic interoperabilty of the partners.

This session will give an overview on the Terminology Server and highlight its value for the semantic interoperabilty of computer systems. We will explain the problem domain and the solution, explain its functionality and technologies. The technology section emphasize the recent developments for the ReST-based Web Services.