In 2002 Canada Health Infoway turned to Business Innovation for help in realizing a pan-Canadian Electronic Health Record (EHR). Business Innovation provided Infoway with experienced technical architecture oversight on Infoway funded projects.
Canada Health Infoway (www.infoway-inforoute.com) was created in response to a commitment by Canada's First Ministers to "work together to strengthen a Canada-wide health infrastructure to improve quality, access and timeliness of health care for Canadians." Their business is investing with partners to develop, replicate, and deploy robust, reusable interoperable EHR solutions faster, better, and more cost effectively than any of their partners can do alone.
Infoway's goal is to have the basic elements of interoperable EHR solutions in place in half of all Canadian jurisdictions by 2010.
Infoway worked in collaboration with the 13 Canadian provinces and territories to develop an Electronic Health Record Solution (EHRS) Blueprint. The Blueprint is a guideline which shows how the large number of systems involved in the provision of health care can be integrated to realize Infoway's vision. Infoway has funded many projects within Canada to build and enhance systems to fit into the Blueprint and therefore, to become available country-wide.
However, there was a need to ensure that the projects adhere to the Blueprint, as it is a relatively high level guideline which needs to be supplemented with deep architectural experience. There are many different concepts, technologies, and standards in the Blueprint (both existing and evolving), that need to be considered while making decisions within sponsored projects on a day to day and week to week basis.
Infoway needed senior architects with deep experience coordinating large IT projects to ensure that the funded projects would realize their vision of a pan-Canadian interoperable Electronic Health Record Solution. To be successful, currently funded projects would need to adhere to the Blueprint while flexibly being able to extend and refine it. Additionally, potential future funded projects would need to be evaluated, selected, and initiated based on their potential to help advance Infoway's vision.
Infoway worked in collaboration with the 13 Canadian provinces and territories to develop an Electronic Health Record Solution (EHRS) Blueprint. The Blueprint is a guideline which shows how the large number of systems involved in the provision of health care can be integrated to realize Infoway's vision. Infoway has funded many projects within Canada to build and enhance systems to fit into the Blueprint and therefore, to become available country-wide.
Business Innovation assisted in the initial development of the Blueprint and continues to aid in its ongoing extension and refinement. The Business Innovation team gained a deep understanding of Infoway's strategy and architectural approach and used this to help formulate the solid yet fluid foundation upon which Infoway must build.
Once the first version of the Blueprint was finalized, the Business Innovation team started to work in an oversight and guidance role with various Infoway funded projects. In addition, the team acted as liaisons between Infoway and the projects in order to evolve and add detail to the Blueprint. The team focused specifically on Registries projects and used their architectural expertise, deep understanding of the Infoway Blueprint, and strategic direction to ensure that the projects delivered solutions that would be successful not just once in the current project lifecycle, but repeatedly when deployed in jurisdictions across Canada.
While working with the leading-edge "wave one" projects, the Business Innovation team created a set of best practices and reusable templates that allowed for quick replication of solutions in new areas. Subsequently, the team worked with these "replication" projects to introduce and teach the knowledge they had documented, thereby maximizing Infoway's investment in the technologies and solutions.
Throughout the engagement, Business Innovation has remained involved in many of the surrounding aspects such as consideration for privacy, authentication and authorization, standards development (e.g. HL7), and the creation of Toolkits, which enable the rapid re-use of the project outcomes in all other provinces and territories across Canada. In this manner, Business Innovation has worked with, and continues to work with Canada Health Infoway to help them realize their vision:
"A high-quality, sustainable and effective Canadian health care system supported by an infrastructure that provides Canadians and their health care providers timely, appropriate, and secure access to the right information when and where they enter into the health care system."
The following are some of the technologies, standards and concepts that have been used during this engagement:
- Service-based architectures / Web services
- HL7 (Health Level 7)
- J2EE
- EMPI (Enterprise Master Person Index)
- EAI (Enterprise Application Integration)