The CSAM® Application Development Platform is utilised by CSAM for development of different client applications and is also made available for customers and partners as a platform for development of in-house applications utilizing data from exsisting systems.
To be able to meet the continous change of requirements in the healthcare industry it is vital to be able to make small adjustmenst to existing solutions, extend existing solutions as well as creating new solutions combining new and existing information elements in an environment that developers master. Less time should be spent making technical details work, and more time should be spent creating functionality that gives added value to the clinical processes and the business.
To meet these challenges, the core modules of CSAM® Plexus™ for integrating and transforming information from different data sources is utilized to make the data available though one API enabling access to all data in a coherent information model.
The development API is made available as Web Services and Enterprise Java Beans enabling access from most modern development languages.
The CSAM® Application Development Platform support different integration and data storage strategies. Although storing data in the Common Data Store has its benefits regarding performance, data warehouse use, etc. in some scenarios replicating the data outside the master data source may not be desired. It is also possible to store indexing information in the Common Data Store to optimize performance in search and overviews while fetching detailed information from the master data source.
Benefits
The major benefits of the CSAM® Application Development Platform are:
- Systems integration by an advanced and powerful platform, across organizational units and institutions
- Common framework for rapid development of clinical applications
- Coherent information model and service API for accessing information from any clinical application
- Extend the lifetime of legacy systems while enable access to information provided from them
Key features
The CSAM® Application Development Platform consists of four modules
- The Integration Toolkit
- The Common Data Store
- The Common Information Model
- The eHealth Service Bus
Below is a description of each of these parts and their role in the Application Development Platform.
Integration Toolkit
The integration toolkit supports back-end integration scenarios as opposed to application integration described above. Back-end integration is typically the scenario where legacy systems will provide their data to the Plexus framework or request data available through the Plexus framework initiated from a server event.
This integration layer uses industry standard HL7v3 to represent the data format. The strategy for integrating with vendors that does not support the HL7v3 format is to create an adapter that maps whatever format to the HL7v3 format. The integration toolkit is implemented using Oracle SOA Suite.
There are several different integration patterns that are supported. Combining the different integration patterns, The CSAM Integration module can be set up to act as an integration engine for different external systems and not just integration between an external system and Plexus. Information received from external systems may also be distributed to other external systems.
Common Data Store
The common data store holds all clinical and configuration data that Plexus uses. This data store is also the basis for all applications developed by CSAM..
The HL7v3 RIM is the basis for the relational data structure that is used in the clinical data repository. This enables the data repository to consume most clinical data structures and ensures that the data model is coherent and has a predictable core structure when extended with attributes and entities that is not identified directly in the HL7 model.
Common Information Model
Although the HL7v3 RIM provides a generic structure for many data structures, in an application development scenario these structures may be difficult to relate to unless you are very familiar with the HL7 terminology and structures. To overcome this problem the RIM-based relational data model is transformed into a more logical information model that gives a more understandable data structure for use at the service and application layer.
As there is no industry standard defining this kind of information model for applications in the healthcare domain the information model is inspired by the HL7v3 RIM. The RIM Based Application Architecture (RIMBAA) working group in HL7 and the openEHR community are working on different approaches related to defining a data structures and application architecture for applications in the healthcare domain. We are following the development of these groups to ensure that the CSAM products are aligned with standards that are adopted in the industry.
eHealth Service Bus
To allow for rapid applications development utilizing information from multiple legacy systems, it is vital to be able to access all the data from one common service layer. The CSAM eHealth Service Bus allows for this by utilizing the mechanisms configured in the Integration Toolkit and the Common Data Store to fetch and update data from multiple data sources.
The service bus gathers the different business services into common and specialized services and enables access to them exposing data in the data structure defined in the common information model.
The service bus is available for access through Web Services utilizing the WS-* standards and conforming to the WS-I profiles to enable access from any development language supporting these industry standards. The services are also available as Enterprise Java Beans for those who prefer to use Java in their application development.