White Papers

In Pursuit of the Holy Grail of Healthcare IT
The Holy Grail of healthcare IT is the ability to provide a Google-like query capability over structured patient data… data in potentially tens of thousands of database  tables resident in enterprise electronic healthcare record (i.e. EHR) systems. Search engines like Google query over unstructured data…. data like text documents and blogs. This article talks about the many technical IT challenges to deliver this kind of capability.

A Healthcare Data Interoperability Proposal
Today, healthcare information for an individual is typically scattered across a variety of complex EHR systems that are incompatible with one-another. The ability to ask questions that cross EHR systems is very challenging. This article discusses these challenges and proposes a solution that potentially provides unprecedented semantic and computing interoperability within and across EHR systems.

The Holy Grail of Information Technology
This article talks about the last frontier in information technology… the ability to perform Google-like queries on structured data… something unheard in the world of structured data. Included is a description of the information system obstacles that must be overcome to deliver such a capability, a high-level architectural view of a proposed solution, and a “just imagine” section that describes the impact on the world with such a capability.

The Patient-Centered Social Collaborative Network
This article describes “just imagine” scenarios in a world in which intelligent medical devices, medical professionals, friends, and family participate and cooperate in a social collaborative network designed to proactively improve and maintain the physical, mental, and emotional health of an individual. Such capability requires an unprecedented level of semantic interoperability that doesn’t exist today and can only be accomplished by providing generalized structured data query capability.

EIM
Enterprise information systems commonly contain ten’s of thousands of data objects – database tables, views, stored procedures, user-defined functions, ETL packages, reports, analysis cubes, SQL scripts, and scheduled ETL or SQL jobs. Maintenace of such an enterprise can be very daunting as there is no way to query the system to understand how all of these various data objects are related to one –another. If, for example, columns are added to a table definition, it is not possible to execute a query that will reveal all of the views, stored procedures, user-defined functions, ETL packages, reports, cubes, SQL unit test scripts, or other tables potentially impacted. Instead, you would have to hope that there is adequate documentation describing these relationships or you would have to browse around and manually open various data objects hoping to stumble upon all of the data objects potentially impacted by such changes.

EIM is a system designed to solve these problems, providing an ability to execute queries that reveal the relationships between data objects. Such a query capability enables faster software development , reduces data maintenance, and increases the quality of enterprise information.