Midterm question # 3

Computerized Database of Baptist Hospital

Computerized Patient Records .Benefits/Problems SolvedBaptist Health Systems (BHS) of South Florida has embarked on a long-term journey towards Computerized Patient Records (CPR). As part of their "continuum of care" effort, Baptist Health Systems will evolve from a series of hospitals to an Integrated Delivery System that also provides well-care. As a result, they will need to manage all clinical information generated as their organization(s) interacts with its patients and other customers.
During their growth, Baptist is required to manage diverse information across very distinct clinical disciplines including diabetes, radiology, pharmacology and pathology. Typically, different vendors specialize in different aspects of healthcare informatics. Although this provides very good departmental solutions, it fosters a sub-optimal enterprisefunctionality, for example, failing to produce consistent identification of a patient across multiple hospitals (or even across different departments within a hospital). Direct access to clinical information is non-existent in these stove-pipe systems. Data is re-populated across the different stovepipe systems through message exchange. The end-result is an inefficient and non-scaleable solution for creating computerized patient records.
Unfortunately, there is not a single information system vendor that covers the full spectrum of managing information throughout the continuum of care. The Baptist Health Systems approach allows the best vendor solution to be implemented for a particular clinical discipline, provided that their solution adheres to an Information Architecture which addresses the shortcomings of the previous generation information systems.
The Information Architecture is equivalent to a blueprint that enforces components of a building to be constructed in a predefined, consistent fashion. Just like each of these building components are guided by standards and standard interfaces, components in the Information Architecture of a healthcare organization must be defined by a set of standard interfaces.
Baptist Health Systems is basing their Computerized Patient Record systems on CORBA and in turn are actively promoting the standardization of their interfaces through the OMG process. Thus far, BHS has signed two contracts for OMA compliant information systems with two separate vendors. BHS has direct access to the CORBA interfaces (IDL) of these systems and expect the CPR to be built as a collection of services/components, each with a set of interfaces. BHS has made OMG conformance an absolute requirement in it's information selection process, and they expect to sign several more multi-million dollar vendor contracts within the upcoming months.

midterm blogspot#2

Ayala Corporation

Ayala Aon Risk Services Inc., the country's biggest retail insurance brokerage firm controlled by the Ayala Corp., is planning to offer insurance packages for dotcom firms in the country to shield them from the risks of doing e-commerce bussiness. Michael Rellosa, vice president for corporate division of Ayala Aon, said the company was negotiating with three information technology firms that were interested in their proposed solutions against the liabilities of e-commerce business. ''There is a great need to manage cyber risks and we at the Ayala Aon have the solution. We are currently working with three dotcom companies relative to their Internet solutions. We're now reviewing their exposures and finding out solutions for them,'' Rellosa said. According to Rellosa, doing business over the Web exposes companies to potential hazards like suits from angry customers who may have been denied of service; lawsuits for transmitting viruses, and complaints for allowing the distribution of defamatory statements through their systems, among others. ''Insurance is the last option. What we package is a solution containing information on how to avoid such risks plus an insurance package,'' Rellosa said. Based on an industry study by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC), computer attacks via the Internet had increased by 183 percent in 1999. An extensive survey of 2,700 executives in 49 countries by Information Week, an online magazine, corroborated the finding. The survey revealed that 64 percent of the companies surveyed admitted that their security system had successfully been breached by at least one computer virus resulting in information loss and theft of data and trade secrets. According to James Patrick Matti, president of Ayala Aon, companies engaged in e-commerce should address their exposure to the Internet. ''These liabilities translate to loss of revenues,'' he said. Ayala Aon is a joint venture company between the Ayala Corp. and Aon Corp., the world's second largest insurance brokerage and risk management consultancy.