The ICW eHealth Framework (eHF) is a powerful platform for the development of software healthcare solutions. InterComponentWare AG (ICW) has incorporated its extensive experience in developing and deploying solutions into the eHealth Framework, which represents the foundation of the Java Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE) development at ICW.

• What is the ICW eHealth Framework?
• How can the ICW eHealth Framework help me?
• Technology Platform
• The ICW eHealth Framework Modules
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The ICW eHealth Framework consists of reusable software components, development tools as well as architectural guidelines and conventions defining a full software-development and product lifecycle.

From the perspective of a partner, the framework provides services and infrastructure capabilities for applications running on top of the eHF. In this way, the partner does not need to worry about recurring tasks such as persistence and security.

The framework allows for a clear focus on the healthcare business of application development. In addition, the eHF offers open interfaces to the outside world that allow existing applications to integrate with ICW or other partner applications based on this framework. So the ICW eHealth Framework facilitates the exchange of data and allows other applications to leverage the services offered by eHF and applications running on top of it.

Reusable Components

The eHF provides a large set of reusable services and enables developers to create their own reusable services, which are provided by framework components. These are currently offered in the following areas:

• Electronic Health Record (EHR) services
• Document repository
• Code System services for the management of controlled vocabularies
• Application Security (authentication and user management).

Externally, these services are exposed through a web service layer and thus applications that are to be integrated with the ICW eHealth Framework can use standard web services technology to access these services. Applications developed on top of the ICW eHealth Framework can leverage these services directly through Java APIs. In addition, such applications can expose their own web services through the ICW eHealth Framework web services layer, an approach that ICW products widely employ. These approaches allow for rapid development of healthcare business components using the framework.

Powerful Tooling: Development Tools and Methods

The ICW eHealth Framework also includes an Integrated Development Environement (IDE) based on the Open Source Eclipse platform. This IDE bundle is pre-configured with all the plugins and extensions required to quickly get started with development on top of the ICW eHealth Framework, including the functionality required to interact with the build environment and the version control subsystem.

Some of the development tools provided as part of the ICW eHealth Framework are:

• Eclipse for the integrated development environment,
• openArchitectureWare for model-driven code generation,
• Both Maven and CruiseControl for the build environment,
• Hibernate for persisting domain objects in a relational database,
• Spring for handling aspect-oriented programming (AOP) methods to enable clean encapsulation of cross-cutting concerns,
• AspectJ used as an alternative to Spring when needed,
• Apache Axis the web service engine of the ICW eHealth Framework.

To support the model-driven development process in the best possible way, ICW has developed its own domain-specific language (DSL) based on UML. This language enables developers to describe the domain objects for the applications in models that are consistent and independent of the technology used to actually implement the model. The ICW eHealth Framework enables the reuse of components at the modelling level, which greatly enhances the semantic consistency of the applications based on it. The automated generation process converts the domain model into executable code and increases the  speed of the development process while at the same time making it less error-prone.

Guaranteed Consistency: Architecture Guidelines

ICW provides developer guides, user guides and white papers to help developers get started with the framework and to make sure that the solutions built on top of the eHF, as well as those integrating with it, are consistent from an architectural perspective. This ensures that these solutions satisfy the highest requirements regarding:

• Application security,
• Flexibility and adaptability of the architecture,
• Modular software development,
• Aspect-orientated development (AOP and AOSD),
• Scalability and high availability,
• Testability,
• Portability between platforms.

The ICW eHealth Framework is available for the following platforms:

• SLES 10/x86/Tomcat 6/Oracle 10g,
• Solaris 10/x86/Tomcat 6/Oracle 10g,
• Solaris 10/SPARC/Tomcat 6/Oracle 10g,
• Windows 2003 Server/x86/Tomcat 6/Oracle 10g.

Since the ICW eHealth Framework uses Java 5 language features such as enumerations and generics, a Java Platform Standard Edition 5 virtual machine is required on the client side.

• Core - establishes the platform for other modules and provides basic functionality,
• Infrastructure - modules in the Infrastructure category enable the interaction between different modules and with 3rd party systems,
• Security - provides sophisticated services to address the sensitivity of medical information; privacy, integrity and availability,
• Application - allows for the maintenance of medical information and documentation.

ICW offers training for the ICW eHealth Framework. The content of these trainings is highly modular and can easily be adapted to suit the specific requirements of the participants. Please contact ICW for details and schedules.

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