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

Long time in the making, we announced on April 17th that Sun and the Province of British Columbia entered a contract to build a provincial laboratory information system - read more.

What's the big deal?

Given the fragmentation of healthcare information about any individual in almost any country, there are currently various activities to create a more comprehensive view of patient data by aggregating those fragments into virtual, longitudinal records. Many scientists and physicians believe that comprehensive, longitudinal records can help making better decisions and therefore lead to better medical outcomes.

In many cases, composite records have to be virtual, as the original data has to remain where it was generated for compliance reasons. A key pre-requisite are electronic medical records - paper and film are not good media for sharing information across long distance and among many partners. At the same time, it is challenging to pull highly sensitive data from various systems and maintain full control over access compliance and data privacy and security at the same time.

So when we saw the PLIS RFI first, we though we had to build a rock solid foundation of identity management, and on top of that use our capabilities to collect data from various systems, generate composite information and connect this with the applications used by care providers every day. Our JES stack  has the key ingridients to build such a system - the IdM Suite and the JCAPS suite. We proposed to build the infrastructure, operate and manage it, together with our partners, and convinced the Provincial selection committee that we can do this better and more cost effective than others.

What is really big about this, is the fact that this will create the largest digital health information exchange in North America AFAIK. Add to this the experience we collected in the SPINE project in England and various regional or local RHIOs in the US, and it's not an exaggeration to state that Sun is the leading provider of Health Information Exchange solutions at this time. What's really cool is that we are not just clobbering together someone else's IP - much of this is Sun IP from the ground up - Solaris, Java, IdM, JCAPS. What a great example for open technology (all of this is open source and can be downloaded for free) driving innovation.

Think about the implications of exit cost for a moment. If Sun would decide tomorrow to stop software development and sell only Intel Servers with Microsoft's operating systems (zero chance of that, but just hypothetically), how would that impact the infrastructure for PLIS? Amazingly, the Province could just go on without re-engineering the entire concept. Although we use so much of our own IP, the Province is not locked in - nor should they. They could buy any x86 server to run the software; our software is open source so they could take it over themselfs. Of course, it's cheaper to let us do the maintenance, but it's good to know that there are options for such a critical infrastructure. In contrast, it's almost inconceiveable that a Government would implenent a provincial, state or national system on a proprietarty technology - imagine asking General Motors to build a freeway for GM cars only. Sorry if you have a Toyota - you'll have to drive on surface roads ;-)

 So, the big deal about PLIS is that it's another case where governments take action and build the infrastructure we need for a digital transformation of health care, and it's also another case where they have chosen a stack of open, interoperable IP (from Sun) to build this new infrastructure.

Those people who are skeptical about IT in Healthcare should look into this as a beacon of hope - change is in the air, and it will spread!