architectures news from FierceHealthIT

It's about time, guys. Federal agencies are placing a new emphasis on the power of IT to foster healthcare industry changes--budgeting nearly $5 billion for infrastructure upgrades and improved network connectivity. Agencies like HHS, the VA and the Department of Homeland Security will place a particular emphasis on EMR adoption and health data sharing next year. To get that done, they plan to consolidate data centers, hook up isolated systems and move some systems to component-based …

Though the ability to collaborate and share information is a critical component of modern IT infrastructures, it is often lacking in healthcare environments, where siloed information is the frustrating norm. Unfortunately, the information is housed on proprietary computing architectures that can't always be accessed by different platforms.

So IBM said last week it is open sourcing technology to the Eclipse Foundation's Open Healthcare Framework project in an effort to bridge the …

There's been considerable debate about what's the best network architecture for RHIOs (regional health information organizations), including whether it should be centralized or decentralized. PhD Steve Beller argues that the best approach is a federated "node-to-node mesh" architecture because it can incorporate all other architectures. Among other reasons, it meets RHIO business needs including maximum reliability, low cost, unlimited scalability and greater robustness because it doesn't …