Enterprise Services:
The team at RC4VETS has performed SOA maturity and technical capabilities assessment within the various Institutes/ centers and defined the SOA lifecycle for NIH. NIH engaged RC4VETS to conduct a SOA Assessment to help determine the current-state of SOA at NIH and make recommendations to help NIH move forward with deploying and managing enterprise services. NIH also engaged RC4VETS to create an end-to-end governance model to support management of these services. By building a core team and leveraging “best of the breed” IT technologies, TS could help teams within NIH to define data exchange formats to ensure the information is interoperable, extensible and as per industry standards. The result was a clear guideline of reusable and interoperable service interface between heterogeneous systems.
Accomplishments
· Successful outreach through data collection supporting the SOA assessment, engaging the Institutes and Centers within NIH
· Successful mentoring and guidance provided on SOA best practices and SOA governance
· Development of SOA governance process to help manage enterprise SOA
· Identification of Integration Architecture updated and architectural patterns
· Support of Enterprise Architecture vision and priority setting for 2010
Reporting Capability:
The team has worked with one of the larger enterprise programs that collects Clinical Research information from various institutes with NIH and provides various reporting capabilities. The analysis was performed on the type of interfaces that are defined for the data retrieval. We evaluated the ETL (Extract - Transform – Load) interfaces, the HL7 messaging interface and other flat file based data loads. The result was a high-level solution based on SOA to define standard interfaces that could be reused by many institutes. The solutions are intended to be interoperable and loosely coupled to increase the reusability and scalability of the integration solutions in line with the EA standards.
Implementation:
The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) needed to improve their approach and implementation of enterprise web content management to get authoritative, timely, and easy-to-use content to the website, reduce the time it takes to produce and deliver authoritative content to all HRSA stakeholders by moving from paper-based, print processes to electronic, content-focused ones, with strong governance, version control, authoritative review and approval, methods to maximize reuse, and the ability to tag content. HRSA wanted to establish a citizen-centric information architecture and vocabulary that allows HRSA content authors, reviewers, and consumers to search for and find content of interest quickly and easily. RC4VETS re-designed the Uniform Data System (UDS) website as a “pilot” user of the Content Management System (CMS) and to improve its overall design.
VA DOD Integration:
As per the Presidential Management Agenda for supporting the Global War on Terror (GWOT), VHA is supposed to ensure that separating service veterans are provided access to care commensurate with their eligibility status. VHA is producing these improvements by defining processes and implementing systems that enable the real-time access to military service information.
Military Data Sharing System (MSDS) is focused on collecting information required to definitively determine eligibility for the VHA Combat Veteran eligibility benefit and for identifying veterans who have served in Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) or Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF).
RC4VETS, along with the prime contractor was part of the Software Engineering and Information (SE & I) group that was tasked to design the service interfaces for this application. As part of this effort, we participated in the design of the following services:
· Service to generate query for military service information
· Service to retrieve information from the following VA/DOD data sources: - VADIR; BIRLS; FHIE-/BHIE
· Design of a Service broker to apply rules to information retrieved from sources and will evaluate whether to query an additional source
HL7 framework (and related standards) was considered for the exchange, integration and sharing of electronic health records. The Businessware messaging services were considered to automate, track, and optimize communication processes within and between data systems, using highly secure and reliable methods, with guaranteed messaging delivery.
Systems engineering and Integration group and VistA Modernization committee
As part of the SE&I group RC4VETS supported the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Office of Information and Technology (OI&T) Office of Enterprise Development (OED) initiative to implement a new enterprise medical records management environment. One of its tasks under SE&I was to help projects implement Veterans Health Administration (VHA) Health Information Model (VHIM). VHIM provides an authoritative semantic and structural VHA enterprise-level reference information model. Its goal is to enable meaningful information exchange within the VHA and externally with the broader healthcare community.
Another task was to conduct a detailed code and technical review some for the existing healthcare applications within the VHA like Clinical Health Data Repository (CHDR), Delivery Service (DS), and Pharmacy Re-engineering (PRE) etc. RC4VETS also provided detailed input to an Analysis of Alternatives (AoA) study team formed to research and recommend a strategy for proceeding with HealtheVet (HeV) Scheduling based on its hands-on knowledge from the parallel development effort for the old RSA system and from a comparative evaluation of viable alternative strategies.
Managed BHIE Enhancements. BHIE is a key system component to sharing data between the Department of Defense and the Department of Veteran’s Affairs. This effort enabled the sharing of reference quality images; enabled data sharing via the Nationwide Health Information Network’s CONNECT Gateway and modified the User Interface for enhanced provider workflow and usability.
