BLOG on IT/IS in Healthcare & Life Sciences Joerg Schwarz on Healthcare [Health + Care]

This is the last entry in my Sun corporate Blog - I will leave Sun and focus entirely on Healthcare Information Security. My new Blog is at WordPress.

On July 1st, we'll celebrate the 4th anniversary of the Sun Healthcare Industry practice. About four years ago now, we started with the preparation for this group and defined in that process five focus areas. We envisioned Sun technologies combined with partner solutions to contribute significant value to the community, by reducing cost and complexity with open-source-based state-of-the art technology:

1. Health Information Exchanges - HIE
2. Secure Data Management for structured and unstructured medical data
3. Caregiver Mobility
4. Regulatory Compliance
5. Consumer Centric Health management

Coming back from the CIO Summit last week and preparing for HIMSS'09 in three, I thought it'd be a good time to review the current state of our healthcare activities and partnerships.

In the next four weeks there will be a number of opportunities to meet and discuss how we can use open source technology for the digital transformation of Healthcare.

While I'm currently in Miami at the CIO Healthcare Summit, meeting and discussing with many U.S. CIOs and analysts from IDC, Eloy Rodriguez is getting ready for INFORSALUD 2009 in Madrid.  Eloy will talk in the plenary session of Inforsalud about open source "Good Always, Better in Crisis Times". Obviously, open source and open standards are key to interoperability, and interopberability is needed to connect and transform healthcare. Sun wil also feature open storage and Caregiver Mobility at the show. Just before HIMSS, we will address the same topics in a Healthcare Techday in Mexico City.

Along those lines will also be our presence at HIMSS 2009 in Chicago, booth 1210, coming up April 5-8. At our booth you will find partners like ThinIdentity, showing phenomenal Windows integration based on our Caregiver mobility solution. Combined with a MITEL VOIP device, we will demonstrate unprecedented session and voice mobility. If you are the lucky recipient of  a smart card invitation, you will be able to roam with one session between the CSC, Sun and AVNET booth properties - care giver mobility in action. We will also address desktop virtualiztion together with VMWare in a combined VDI solution.

Together with Bridgehead, we will turn up the HEAT for our joint Healthcare Enterprise Data Management solution based on Sun open storage and optional StorageTek Tape Libraries.

Given that the ARRA 2009 includes substantial incentives to build HIE (look at this analysis from AMA), we anticipate a lot of good discussions at HIMSS around HIE. We will showcase the working HIE implementation of the Province of B.C, PLIS, and other HIE implementations and pilots based on our open source HIE stack, such as NHIN. And in this BLOG we discussed already several times the Privacy and Data security provisions in HIPAA that are also part of ARRA 2009, which we will of course address and showcase with our partner FairWarning.