IT Architecture for the Enterprise

Semantech: IT Architecture in the Enterprise from Stephen Lahanas

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What is Intelligent Healthcare ?

A definition and introduction...

“Intelligent Healthcare” (IH) is a metaphor both for design and for practice with the explicit understanding that through emerging technologies those two will become ever more closely intertwined. IH recognizes that there are or will be innumerable potential domain boundaries both internally and externally that will necessarily segment ‘islands of information.’ Those islands of information represent individual and community knowledge and practice options. The role of IH is to both harness those diverse information resources dynamically and apply them back to their respective communities to enable continuous practice improvements. So at the lowest level, Intelligent Healthcare requires tools and techniques that can access and distribute data across domains as needed. As the Healthcare environment becomes more sophisticated the technical goals will evolve to encompass:

• Pattern identification & management.
• Trend prediction and dashboards.
• Process and scenario driven dynamic integration of enterprise-wide data sources (the full spectrum of clinical systems).
• Multi-level Collaboration, from the immediate organizational perspective through to Global Communities of Practice.
• Symbiotic performance engineering (of both patient outcomes and solution service level expectations).

Intelligent Healthcare is a concept, a methodology as well as an architectural approach

The IH metaphor allows us to grow in evolutionary directions in order to achieve our primary goals with relation to Healthcare. It places all enabling technology in the context of a set of functional goals which are not likely to change anytime soon:

1. Improved patient outcomes.

2. Cost reduction and greater efficiency through practice / process improvement.

3. Rapid / agile adoption of innovation or emerging technologies which enhance Healthcare provision. 

Intelligent Healthcare is more than any single technical solution, more than any single standardized approach – it finally places the real challenges up front and ensures that all component elements targeted to those challenges do not become larger than the primary functional goals. Future posts will examine the architecture of IH in greater depth...

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