ARMONK, NY – February 25, 2008 – IBM (NYSE:
IBM) today announced that it is collaborating with nine business
partners to help healthcare providers, clinics and hospitals
improve productivity, increase quality and reduce costs through
the use of service
oriented architecture (SOA). These partners
are all working to develop their latest healthcare applications
using the IBM
SOA Foundation and supporting a set of open
technology and industry standards.
IBM's
healthcare strategy is based on the adoption of an
SOA approach and the use of open standards and standards-based
electronic health records to provide secure and private exchanges
of records between authorized healthcare provider and healthcare
payer organizations. To achieve these goals, IBM is currently
working with clients within the healthcare industry to transform
the information delivery processes and related business processes
to be more “patient-centric.”
Clients who deploy infrastructures based on this strategy
can improve the quality of healthcare delivered to their
patents while reducing the costs and expenses of providing
these healthcare services. SOA can also allow these healthcare
providers to increase their agility to meet future changes
as the healthcare industry adopts new regulations or embraces
new methodologies in the delivery of care.
The nine partners announced today provide applications that
support a growing healthcare community that currently includes
more than 8,000 clients worldwide. Their applications encompass
many of the specialty fields that impact the healthcare industry
including: electronic health records (Blueware); clinical
portal (Carefx); document management (CGI
Solutions and Technologies and Ricoh); health analytics (Convergence
CT); consent management
(HIPAAT); health enterprise management (Lawson); communications
(Nortel); and clinical and financial information management
(Siemens
Medical Solutions).
“Healthcare is going through a fundamental transformation
where innovation will be driven by a healthcare provider’s
ability to achieve true interoperability,” said Janet
Dillione, CEO of the Health Services business unit of Siemens
Medical Solutions. “IBM has based its SOA healthcare
strategy on open standards, which is similar to our strategy.
At Siemens, SOA is a core enabler of workflow technology
that assists healthcare organizations in realizing the agility,
interoperability, and efficiencies needed to drive healthcare
quality up and costs down. This strategy has served as a
guiding principle in our Soarian development efforts."
Since it is based on interoperability and supports numerous
open standards within the industry , IBM’s SOA healthcare
strategy can help clients to significantly reduce development
time and lower costs. Depending on need, various components
of the IBM SOA Foundation can be used to connect and integrate
existing systems and data repositories to unlock, access,
and act on information across the enterprise. The IBM SOA
Foundation is an integrated, open-standards-based set of
software, best practices and patterns for SOA.
IBM’s broad partnerships enable leading software providers
to participate in the overall SOA strategy, giving healthcare
providers full flexibility in choosing the business applications
they need to address specific business processes and challenges.
One example of this is DirectConnect, an internal initiative
to provide a streamlined workflow to clinicians within Catholic
Healthcare West (CHW), the eighth largest hospital system
in the nation and the largest not-for-profit hospital provider
in California. Together, IBM teamed with Carefx to deliver
a portal-based, aggregate view of real-time, patient-centric
data that connects CHW clinicians to the information necessary
to deliver care.
“DirectConnect’s ability to aggregate patient
data in one comprehensive and complete view improves the
delivery of patient care and the work lives of our physicians,” said
Terry Ambus, M.D., chief of staff, Mercy Gilbert Medical
Center and Chandler Regional Hospital. “With instant
access to essential information such as vital signs, laboratory
results, radiology exams and medication lists, our healthcare
professionals can make more informed decisions and concentrate
time on direct patient interaction.”
SOA can also help healthcare companies build, extend, and
transform their existing infrastructures incrementally over
time, by allowing multiple systems to consume and re-use
business services, and provide web-based collaboration throughout
the healthcare community.
“Integration is one of the biggest problems facing
healthcare today,” said Ivo Nelson, Vice President,
IBM Global Healthcare Provider. “IBM’s SOA healthcare
strategy provides clients with a smart and flexible infrastructure
that takes advantage of existing and new technologies to
support changing business operations and conditions.”
IBM’s SOA strategy incorporates aspects of several
industry-leading product portfolios including WebSphere,
Lotus,
Tivoli, Rational and Information
Management and is
a critical component of IBM’s Information on Demand
initiative. These portfolios have been further strengthened
by a series of key acquisitions such as Cognos, ISS and Watchfire.
SOA is among the fastest-growing segments of the information
technology industry and IBM offers the most comprehensive
portfolio of software, services and hardware for building,
maintaining and extending SOA environments. IBM has the largest
number of SOA clients, with more than 5,700 SOA engagements
all over the world. IBM also has a community of more than
4,200 SOA Business Partners worldwide. For more information
on IBM’s SOA capabilities, visit www.ibm.com/soa
Visit the IBM website for more information on IBM healthcare
solutions.
IBM will host IMPACT 2008, the industry's largest SOA conference,
April 6-11 in Las Vegas. For more information go to: www.ibm.com/soa/impact2008
###
IBM, WebSphere, Lotus, Tivoli, Rational,
SmartSOA, Cognos, DB2 and the IBM e-business logo are trademarks
or registered
trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation.
For a list of additional IBM trademarks, please see www.ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml
All other company, product or service names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks of others. Statements concerning
IBM's future development plans and schedules
1 Such as HIPAA EDI, HL7, and the IHE integration
profiles.
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