Active X based standards for healthcare integration

Abstract

With cost pressures brought to the forefront by the growth of managed care, the integration of healthcare information systems is more important than ever. Providers of healthcare information are under increasing pressure to provide timely information to end users in a cost effective manner. Organizations have had to decide between the strong functionality that a multi-vendor `best of breed' architecture provides and the strong integration provided by a single-vendor solution. As connectivity between systems increased, these interfaces were migrated to work across serial and eventually, network, connections. In addition, the content of the information became standardized through efforts like HL7 and ANSI X12 and Edifact. Although content-based standards go a long way towards facilitating interoperability, there is also quite a bit of work required to connect two systems even when they both adhere to the standard. A key to accomplishing this goal is increasing the connectivity between disparate systems in the healthcare environment. Microsoft is working with healthcare organizations and independent software vendors to bring Microsoft's powerful enterprise object technology, ActiveX, to the healthcare industry. Whilst object orientation has been heralded as the `next big thing' in computer applications development, Microsoft believe that, in fact, component software is the technology which will provide the greatest benefit to end users.