Introduction

Running the business efficiently and delivering solid value to customers have always been hallmarks of successful companies. However, today's companies have to cope with much more. For example, over the past few years it has become increasingly important for U.S. organizations to devote appropriate resources to the issues of corporate governance and regulatory compliance. Organizations of all types have tightened internal controls as a result of new regulations and increased investor focus on corporate oversight.

Overview

Integrated Delivery networks (IDNs) face complex challenges in getting the right data into the right hands, at the right time, with the goal of more informed decision-making and improved clinical and financial performance.

In many cases today, even with the use of traditional business intelligence tools and an enterprise data warehouse, important data often remains hard to access and difficult to aggregate and present to healthcare providers in a useful, unified format.

Introduction

Experts estimate that 85% of all data exists in unstructured formats – held in e-mails, documents (contracts, memos, clinical notes, legal briefs), social media feeds, etc. Where structured data typically accounts for quantitative facts, the more interesting and potentially more valuable expert opinions and conclusions are often hidden in these unstructured formats. And with massive volumes of text being generated at unprecedented speed, there’s very little chance this information can be made useful without some process of synthesis or automation.

Introduction

As healthcare providers face increasing pressures to lower costs and reduce readmissions, they're rapidly shifting towards accountable?care organizations (ACOs) and other coordinated, quality-based reimbursement systems. However, most providers have historically?organized their data and workflows in ways that best fi t the fee-for-service payment model. Now that so many providers are sharing?risks and rewards, they must also share and coordinate information by adopting more streamlined health information technology?solutions.

InterSystems encourages the adoption of a flexible, practical approach to application development, rather than strict adherence to one of the prevalent development theories. This paper offers advice based upon our experience. However needs, attitudes, and styles vary; we recommend that each programmer choose the development approach that works best for them. Caché supports a wide range of development methodologies, not just those recommended here.

Improved Access to Clinical Data Across Hospitals and Systems Helps Pharmaceutical Companies Reduce Delays and the Costs Associated With Bringing New Treatments to Market

Executive Summary

The pharmaceutical and life sciences industry has a strategic imperative to accelerate clinical research in order to reduce overall R&D costs while delivering innovative treatments.

Providing a reliable infrastructure for rapid, unattended, automated failover

Technology Overview

Traditional availability and replication solutions often require substantial capital investments in infrastructure, deployment, configuration, software licensing, and planning. Caché Database Mirroring (Mirroring) is designed to provide an economical solution for rapid, reliable, robust, automatic failover between two Caché systems, making mirroring the ideal automatic failover high-availability solution for the enterprise.

How do you balance the need to achieve an early success with SOA against the requirement for an architecture that will deliver long term success? You don't want to get bogged down in architectural committees for three years, but you don't want to make short term decisions that will be roadblocks to long term success.

If your first project is to deploy a small number of reusable services in a matter of months but you know that four years from now you might have hundreds of services, an enterprise SOA infrastructure and specialized governance technology you have a dilemma.

Introduction

Application integration at its simplest is often just one application sending a message to another to notify it of some change. Perhaps when a patient arrives at a hospital, the registration system will send a message to clinical systems so they have all demographic data ready to use. Of perhaps it is just a nightly file transfer from the sales system to the accounting system.

But modern application integration platforms or suites can do a lot more than this to help applications work together and add real value to the enterprise.

Are you new to Ensemble? InterSystems provides several tools to learn the basics of Ensemble and get on your way to becoming an expert in the technology. Before installing Ensemble, take a look at the Ensemble Technology Overview and Getting Started with Ensemble in documentation. Respectively, these documents explain features and major components of Ensemble as well as how to install the software.

Introduction

HL7 V2 message routing solutions often have hundreds of business services, processes and operations. Inevitably things will go wrong and you have to monitor the production to be able to react quickly and resolve any problems before they can become serious issues.

Ensemble includes some powerful alerting capabilities that can help, but if you aren't careful you will be inundated with alerts and your inbox more or less becomes a copy of the event log defeating the object of the exercise.

Introduction

This paper describes how Ensemble behaves after a system crash or similar uncontrolled shutdown or failover. Ensemble is normally configured to start processing messages automatically when the operating system restarts or when the system has failed over to a cluster member or mirror member. No manual intervention is required. But, in order for your system to robustly handle system failure and restart, you must understand how Ensemble handles these conditions and develop your productions using the rules and guidelines in this document.

Ensemble is based on message flow, and a data transformation is a way to convert from one message type to another. DTL (Data Transformation Language) adds a layer to this - it provides a graphical way to do the conversion. This is really helpful because most of the time, people with domain-specific knowledge may not have extensive coding skills. However, you always have the ability to do some coding, so if you need or want to, this is available.

DTL has several components: the data transformation engine, the language itself, and the DTL editor.

An introduction to virtual documents

Ensemble virtual documents enable your productions to work with large and complex documents with little overhead.

What is a virtual document?

A virtual document is a special kind of Ensemble message, for use with Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) messages and with XML documents.

How are virtual documents different from standard messages?

The body of any Ensemble message is represented by a persistent class that has one property for each value that the message is intended to carry.

The Business Processing Language - for orchestration and long-running business processes.

Ensemble can orchestrate calls to external systems. Very often this is done to implement or automate a long-running business process - that is, real business processes where people interact with a series of different systems to complete complex tasks. BPL (the Business Processing Language) provides a graphical way to create these orchestrations.