The Credit Valley Hospital
The Credit Valley Hospital Ensures Healthy Application Integration with BizTalk Server 2004
|
|
Company Overview
The Credit Valley Hospital has been providing patients with access to cutting-edge medical research, programs and treatment for almost two decades. Serving more than 5,400 visitors every day, the hospital generates and stores a huge amount of data, from patient demographic information to digital diagnostic images, in a Clinical Information System called MEDITECH. To streamline processes around patient care, medical and support staff have access to this data through a variety of front-end applications.
Business Challenge
The hospital relies on middleware applications to connect MEDITECH with front-end applications. Applications designed for the medical industry typically use a special messaging format called Health Level 7 (HL7), similar to the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) format used in business, to help automate data exchange.
All of the interface points at the hospital had been built with a middleware tool called Sybase eBiz 2000. While the solution adequately automated data transfer, each integration point required the hospital to hire an outside consulting firm to build and maintain the link. With aggressive growth plans, The Credit Valley Hospital IT team realized the Sybase solution would become too expensive to maintain in the future.
“In healthcare, the need to find cost-effective solutions applies to every department, from the medical staff to the IT team,” says Avril Cardoso, manager, application services, The Credit Valley Hospital. “We knew that the Sybase system would become far too expensive to justify in the future, especially with the hospital’s plan to open an expanded regional cancer centre and integrate its systems with the rest of the hospital.”
The hospital wanted an affordable middleware solution that would easily integrate with its existing Microsoft infrastructure and allow internal staff to implement and maintain integration points using the skills and technologies they were already familiar with. Working with Microsoft® technology partner Sunaptic Solutions, the hospital began looking for a solution that would meet its needs.
|
Solution
Sunaptic Solutions recommended Microsoft BizTalk® Server 2004 and the BizTalk Accelerator for HL7. Besides integrating with the hospital’s existing Microsoft infrastructure, the BizTalk solution would help streamline the process of deploying integration points between MEDITECH and front-end applications, using the HL7 messaging format.
“We felt that BizTalk Server 2004 and the HL7 Accelerator were clearly the best fit for The Credit Valley Hospital,” says Avelino Lopez, technical architect, Sunaptic Solutions. “We knew that with some training, the hospital IT staff would be able to deploy and maintain BizTalk integration points without costly assistance from outside consultants.”
BizTalk Server 2004 helps organizations integrate internal and external systems, automating data interactions in a highly flexible manner. Built on BizTalk Server, the BizTalk HL7 Accelerator customizes the solution for the healthcare industry by providing all the necessary schemas, validation rules and connectivity requirements to exchange HL7 messages. BizTalk Server also uses Microsoft’s popular Visual Studio® development tools to help ease the deployment of integration projects for IT teams.
“We have a really strong Microsoft skill set within our development team, so when we heard about BizTalk Server 2004, it made sense to use that to integrate our applications,” says Cardoso. “BizTalk HL7 accelerator maps out the schema for us, and enables us to build interfaces in-house to share patient data between third-party systems. BizTalk also integrates more securely with our operating system database, and security is becoming more crucial as we move to a system with a single sign-on.”
Using BizTalk Server and Visual Studio, the hospital IT team built integration points between MEDITECH and two front-end applications, used for collecting data on patient feedback and employee risk. To monitor the health of the application, the hospital also implemented Microsoft Operation Manager (MOM) 2005, a tool that continuously monitors and reports on application, servers and desktop computers.
The MOM solution allows the IT team to closely monitor the BizTalk integration points and identify problems before they affect the system. As an additional business continuity precaution, the team leveraged the network load balancing and clustering capabilities of BizTalk Server. These features allow the system to run simultaneously on different pieces of server hardware and switch between the two in the advent of a malfunction.
“The network load balancing and support for database clustering within BizTalk puts redundancies in place that help provide better stability. By including MOM in the solution, we can now also carefully monitor events at each of the integration points, and identify and resolve problem areas before they shut down the system,” says Paul La Vita, applications analyst, The Credit Valley Hospital. “None of these capabilities were supported by our old Sybase solution.”
After a successful two-week development phase, the team has also developed plans to implement additional in-house integration points, including joining the hospital’s main systems with the infrastructure of a new expanded regional cancer centre scheduled to open in July 2005.
Business Benefits
The combination of BizTalk Accelerator for HL7 and BizTalk Server 2004 is helping The Credit Valley Hospital integrate its critical applications more easily and for less cost. Such benefits have a ripple effect – the less time and money hospitals spend on managing their IT infrastructures, the more they can focus on providing the highest-quality patient care.
Improved Patient Care
With BizTalk Server 2004 in place, Credit Valley staff is able to dedicate more time to caring for patients. The middleware solution’s HL7 Accelerator automatically translates the different versions of HL7 used by each hospital application, which means employees spend less time moving patient data manually from one system to another.
“BizTalk really frees up people to do more patient care, which is what they’re trained to do,” says Cardoso. “Because all our applications talk in different versions of HL7, we had issues with our old interface engine where staff would have to key in data between systems, which was extremely time consuming. BizTalk Server’s HL7 Accelerator eliminates the issue because with a few minor tweaks, it maps out the scheme for us.”
Capitalizing on Existing Skill Sets
The unified development environment of BizTalk Server 2004 with Visual Studio is enabling Credit Valley to capitalize on its existing developer skill sets, translating to better value and increased productivity for the hospital.
“Not only will BizTalk be able to save significant integration dollars by letting us connect our applications in-house, but the technology is saving money by eliminating the need to pay consulting fees to have every interface built for us,” says Cardoso. “We’re also saving by reducing manual effort that would cost us at least one full-time equivalent.”
Redundancy and Stability
The network load balancing and clustering features of BizTalk Server 2004, combined with the monitoring capabilities of MOM, are helping provide a more stable IT environment for The Credit Valley Hospital. This ability is essential for maintaining continuous access to critical healthcare applications such as the PACS diagnostic imaging system.
“We’ve set up MOM to work with BizTalk so we receive messages when the interface goes down – we’re instantly notified by e-mail if there’s a problem,” says La Vita. “With our old system, often we didn’t know about problems until hours later when they began to effect users, whereas now we’re alerted and can do a fix before users even notice something is wrong.”
Automating for the Future
The Credit Valley Hospital supports a large out-patient population, with some 50 clinics where people come in and out for daily treatment. Unit clerks spend three-quarters of their day just registering people who are checking into each clinic. In January 2005, the hospital’s IT team initiated a pilot project to automate this process using self-serve kiosks and barcode scanners.
“The vast majority of these registrations could be automated, and those resources could be freed up to do things that are more directly associated with patient care,” says La Vita. “We designed a simple file-sharing system using Visual Basic® 6, which was a great success in the pilot stage. Over the next year we’re going to expand this out to the rest of the hospital, and we will need something more robust to communicate between the front-end scanning part and the back end – the native tools in BizTalk 2004 provide that messaging capability.”
Microsoft Windows Server System
Microsoft Windows Server System is a comprehensive, integrated, and interoperable server infrastructure that helps reduce the complexity and costs of building, deploying, connecting, and operating agile business solutions. Windows Server System helps customers create new value for their business through the strategic use of their IT assets. With the Windows Server operating system as its foundation, Windows Server System delivers dependable infrastructure for data management and analysis; enterprise integration; customer, partner, and employee portals; business process automation; communications and collaboration; and core IT operations including security, deployment, and systems management.
For more information about Windows Server System, go to: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: www.microsoft.com
For more information about Sunaptic Solutions, call (604) 629-0891 or visit the Web site at: www.sunaptic.com
For more information about The Credit Valley Hospital, call (905) 813-2200 or visit the Web site at: www.cvh.on.ca
