A Modern Platform for Modern Health Care
Unfortunately most of the software sold by health IT vendors today is based on old architectures that are hard to change, systems that lock in your data so that new functions are expensive or impossible to implement, and products suites that re-implement the same functionality because they were not designed to work together. It is no surprise that health IT systems do not support operational innovation and localisation, both key factors in achieving a return on investment and user buy-in for IT systems.
Alcidion has decided to differentiate the Miya Platform from traditional health IT approaches by creating a system that will be a modern and robust platform for health care. Miya has the following attributes:
- Flexible architecture. A loosely coupled system that can be localised and incrementally improved at low risk and low cost
- Intelligent infrastructure. The ability to manage business logic and customised features using the decision support engine, thereby avoiding significant programming efforts with its resultant risk
- Standards. Principled standards-based approach to terminology and meta-data to enable management of knowledge assets across the enterprise
- Interoperability. Service oriented platform that can present and consume data to and from multiple systems, including non-Alcidion systems
- Speed & Scalability. It’s got to be really fast and scalable supporting virtualisation and distributed computing
The diagram below shows the high level architecture of the Miya Platform.
To learn more about each of the components of the Miya Platform click on the following headings:
Integration Capabilities
Miya can support third party integration engines, but comes with the Miya Clinical Data Engine that captures data from messaging systems (HL7 2.x, 3.x, XML, JSON, other structured text), file systems (FTP, file watching) and database polling (ODBC, SQL Server). Once captured, data is processed, validated, and made consistent for storage in the Miya Core Database.
Data entering Miya is fully audited and can be replayed if necessary either by feed, or in correct order across all feeds. Each data source is tracked separately, so different rules can be applied, for example, to lab results from different pathology providers.
Miya Core Database
Once data is processed via the Clinical Data Engine it is presented to data subscribers that write data into the Miya Core Database, and its associated specialty databases. Miya is implemented on SQL Server 2008 and is designed for high volume data, and for decision support access to the data.
DSE Grid Computing
The Miya Decision Support Engine (DSE) is based on over 20 years of research into health care decision support. It incorporates multiple problem solving methods that are glued together by a innovative, highly optimised decision support language which supports meta data management and analytics capabilities. Methods implemented in the DSE include optimised rules, decision tables, mathematical expressions, statistical methods, Bayesian networks and decision theoretic models. Other methods can be added as required.
The DSE has been created using grid-based technology, but with careful design to avoid problems that arise from processing in parallel clinical messages. The DSE also brings to health care best practices from software engineering, such as design by contract, integrated testing, parallel execution, functional language features.
Service Oriented Architecture
The Miya Platform is based on a modern Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), providing both XML/SOAP and JSON services to support rich clients, web and mobile clients. Significantly, the Miya Platform is not tied specifically to Alcidion’s client applications. This means that new clients, new platforms, and updates to existing clients are much lower risk than traditional tightly coupled platforms.
The Miya Platform has been engineered to be scalable for large numbers of clients accessing its services, which means that new clients can act as a layer of clinical intelligence for applications in your organisation.
Clients
Alcidion has created a sophisticated, plug-in framework for rich desktop clients, such as the Miya Clinical Dashboard. This technology is called Application Framework 3 (AF3). Localising rich clients based on AF3 does not result in a plethora of unmaintainable versions like traditional application technology; rather, localisations are supported within AF3 via configuration, including support for new types of data.
Miya supports web and mobile clients. Alcidion has created web based clients that provide a rich graphical experience, and have systems that work on mobile clients such as the iPad and iPhone.
Development Platform
Alcidion’s Rich Client Framework is written in C# and uses OpenGL. Alcidion’s web clients use AJAX (actually using JSON as much as possible rather than XML), with Javascript and the jQuery library.
