ARE WE ENTERING A NEW AGE IN HEALTH INFORMATICS?

Currently, we witness the process of forming of initial clusters out of the “cosmic dust” of individuals and isolated groups, who are sensing the need for a continuous health information cyberspace, that goes beyond traditional interoperability, perhaps, best represented by the CONNECT Gateway. The general idea is to have a common health IT architecture, which would allow software developers quickly build new applications to meet any specific demand, today or in the future. One of those new gravitational centers, namely, the Clinical Groupware Collaborative, has just sprung into existence, and manifested its birth with a declaration of principles. The fact that Dr. Bill Crounse was a member of the initial “Working Group” makes it safe to assume that the Microsoft Connected Health Framework will likely to be that architecture for participants in the Collaborative. The framework structure offers a heavy dose of SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture), modular componentization, data abstraction and implementation variability. It comes with the most complete and best documented set of guidelines so far, applicable to any eHealth project, regardless of the choice of platform and OS.