Roadmap 2011
Well, it’s that time of year when we at CarePaths start thinking about what next year’s agenda should look like. First, though, a word about what we accomplished in 2010. First and foremost, much of 2010 has been spent getting full integration and deployment of Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL and the retirement of our legacy code and databases. We are about 70% finished with that work, and the rest should go fairly easily given the work that is already up and running in production now. We are planning to turn off the old code and convert whatever data remains in our old database server during the week between Christmas and New Years.
In 2011, we will be extending our gains with the following major goals:
1) Improved Decision Support: This is critical for many of our users and the existing system needs to be more customizeable with real-time alerts and statistics in the form of “dashboard” style widgets on the home page and in the headers, and a live chat engine to connect users to other users as well as to CarePaths support.
2) Improved integration with ePrescribing: We want more features and better, quicker integration for common tasks such as renewing prescriptions electronically and printing off/faxing a prescription.
3) Offline Documents: We will be exploring the use of CouchDB as a briefcase to allow users to go offline, complete documents and then resync them later with the eRecord once they have an Internet connection. There are several projects around the world, one in South Africa, that we have heard of where healthcare workers are going into the field, completing healthcare forms, and then reconnecting later. This is a very exciting prospect and would be quite useful in a variety of healthcare settings where the Internet is not always available and 3G wireless is too expensive.
4) Improve the GUI (Graphical User Interface — what users work with): We want to consolidate many of the pages and add more automated behavior without having to move to a new page. An example is having a list page inject the details of the list item immediately without having to go to a separate page to see the details. This is very “doable” we just need to spend time with it.
5) Performance: The last quarter of 2010 has been spent installing new, faster database engines and improving the configurations of the eRecord to improve speed. With the retirement of our legacy code and data structures, our ability to focus on performance will be very much enhanced and we will be putting very tight parameters on what consitutes a “slow page.”
6) Disaster Recovery and Load Balancing: We hope to open a second “stack” out West somewhere, perhaps Dallas or maybe Colorado. This should improve performance for our West Coast customers while providing us with a ready backup for our East Coast servers should our North Carolina facility have a major disaster. The two clusters will each be able to handle all of the eRecord traffic such that in the event of a disaster, we can simply reroute requests via our DNS (Domain Name Servers) to point to the other cluster. The clusters will have been syncing with each other in real-time continuously so that the data loss in the event of a total loss of one of our data centers should be negligible (minutes at most). Currently, we offload data out of the data center every night.
7) CCHIT Certification: Now that CCHIT has been authorized by the Federal Government to certify EMRs and has published the certification crierion, we will be working solidly throughout the year to implement those criterion. We have much of it already and some of it just needs to be altered or improved. Of course, there are significant pieces of work that needs to be done, so aside from the items listed above, the functionality listed in the CCHIT certification manual is now our primary “spec” for new development. We hope to apply for certification sometime in the second half of the year.
Whew, that is a lot. Break out the coffee and fire up the dry-erase pens…2011, here we come!