Why Healthcare DTF Solutions?

Interoperability

As software engineers we have been faced with designing and developing systems that deal with complex healthcare information. During the last three decades software engineers have been developing and maintaining healthcare systems usually based on proprietary technologies. As the industry business has evolved it has become increasingly more difficult to provide a level of services desired by our users. Systems were and are having difficulty in providing the necessary extensibility to their products that our customers desire, not only from a functional perspective but from an industry standard perspective as well. Products do not seamlessly integrate with off the shelf operating systems or off the shelf applications. Moreover, of greater importance to users and the healthcare industry is the need to seamlessly interact in a distributed heterogeneous environment, which has lead to the need to consider a move to a more standard paradigm.

An integrated presentation of the medical record is needed to allow all healthcare stakeholders the opportunity to utilize information in their day-to-day business

The Healthcare DTF specifications/standards are built as CORBA interfaces which provide a high degree of interoperability between computer systems

This is particularly important in large hospitals, where many kinds of different computers have been installed and cannot be changed

Object-oriented approach

There is a high percentage of code that is either; undelivered, unusable, late, and or over budget. The maintenance costs are extremely high; in some cases, 80% of a developer’s efforts are focused on maintenance. The cost of employee turnover is very high due to outdated development methodologies. In addition, in many systems no methodology is used but rather referred to as hand crafted “works of art.” Software development is not approached like an engineering problem, consequently, modifying and extending these systems is difficult, costly and error prone. Because sound engineering principles are rarely applied, high rates of defects show up pervasively through our industry.

The Healthcare DTF will open the access to a much larger range of software components, which will more rapidly be available at your site

Standardized interfaces will help shield you from excessive extensibility and maintenance costs

The Healthcare DTF is based on the OMG OMA, which is fully object-oriented thereby allowing solutions to more easily be created for such a complex environment

By utilizing an object-oriented engineering practice you can design and develop reusable components, which, in turn, allow you to produce higher quality, timelier solutions to help meet business needs

Provide increased extensibility at lower development cost and in a more timely fashion

Minimize duplication

Increase resilience to change

Increased understanding for developers and users

Increase the use of systems

Coexist with the evolution of technology

Provide higher quality development

Deploy in an distributed object environment

Components get reused as-is in new or dynamically reconfigured applications

Programmers build new objects by making incremental modifications to existing ones without having to recode the parts that already work

Mix and match tools within a project (build your desktop component with an interactive builder and your server code at a lower-level language like C++)

Freedom of Choice

The Healthcare DTF solutions and approaches open the freedom of choices between several competing providers of components. This, in turn, improves the quality of the components and helps reduce software costs.

Provides conformance levels that can be geared toward specific expert solutions

The freedom to change out system components when needed without replacing complete systems

Standard

The OMG is an independent non-profit organization. It has no interest in selling any particular software product. The OMG works only on agreements about standardized interfaces, which can be implemented by any interested provider.

CORBA becomes a standard in the world

At an industrial level industries such as manufacturing, banking, telecommunications, etc. are creating a standard world in which the consumer wins

At an international level not only in US where it started, but also in Europe, Japan and South America CORBA standards are and continue to move into the mainstream

Having objects accessible through standardized distributed technologies provides the following benefits:

            1. The ability to reuse existing products that have been through the Development Life-Cycle
            2. Utilize components that are located in different departments or divisions
            3. Utilize components located inside and outside your enterprise, including site of customers, suppliers, and service providers
            4. Utilize components from multiple software vendors
            5. Allows for the use of existing infrastructures
            6. Allows for the concentration of efforts on solving the need of getting the correct information to the correct people without manual mechanisms being involved
            7. It minimizes the exuberant costs of having duplicate copies of information being located at each site
            8. Standard interfaces are available
            9. Standard services are available
            10. Standard interfaces coupled with a thin layer of wrapper code bring legacy applications into the environment which allows for the ability to keep your business going while you bring in distributed computing and object orientation
            11. Maximizes programmer productivity
            12. A sophisticated infrastructure exists
            13. Transparent distribution
            14. Portability
            15. Interoperability results because clients on one platform know how to invoke standard operations on objects on any other platform