SaaS: Software-As-A-Service is a business model where software solution companies such as SOWSIA offer their products for use over the Internet. More recently, a lot of ASP infrastructure vendors are evolving in to SaaS way of doing business, offering a more comprehensive set of hardware and network monitoring tools, billing, and other ondemand services for their hosted clients.
ASP: Application Service Provider is a term generally associated with infrastructure vendors such as IBM, and many others that host software applications for businesses. Some software companies such as Oracle host their own solutions.
Middleware: As a software, it provides the ability to integrate legacy applications with other solutions.
EMR: An Electronic Medical Record (EMR) is a specific patient record from one healthcare provider.
EHR: An Electronic Health Record (EHR) is a collection of health information of a patient from diverse systems within the care provider network. Essentially, there are multiple EMRs and EHRs for a patient.
CCR: The Continuity of Care (CCR) is a required subset of information from a patient’s EMR or EHR made available to another provider that needs to deliver care to that patient.
PHR: Patient Health Record (PHR) is a health record maintained by an individual.
NHIN: A $200 billion US National Health Information Network initiative to connect all entities in health care such as physicians, patients, hospitals, public health agencies so that they can share clinical information in real-time. The goal is within the next decade.
RHIO: Regional Health Information Organization are local versions of NHIN initiative for health information exchange, and are being organized in every state in the US.
J2EE: Java specifications from Sun Microsystems.
.NET: Microsofts solution for interoperability on Windows platform.
XML: A language used to define data structures and information specifications. Eg. Physician Name in XML could be defined as <Physician Name> Your Name here </Physician Name>. The tags or elements around Your Name are said to contain your information. Computer programs recognize the tags and process the information. XML is a loose language with many variants.
HL7: A flavor of XML used specifically for sharing information in Healthcare.
SOAP: No. This is not a physician's SOAP note, but it is a protocol which facilitates information communication over the Internet. Think of SOAP as an envelope that carries health information in XML or HL7 formats.
Web Services: It is a technology that allows software programs written in J2EE or .Net to expose themselves for discovery and use by others on the Internet.
SOA: Service Oriented Architecture is a software framework to facilitate interoperability amongst different applications. It can be used to build new breed of softwares, also called composite applications, from existing software solutions.
UDDI: It is a registry for locating business entities and their web services or software programs (usually in the form of a WSDL specification) on the Internet. Developers use UDDI to build and bind their code with services listed in the registry using WSDL.
Grid: As an enabling platform, it facilitates building of a Information Network on the Web.
Please note that the above definitions are not complete and were simplified for health care professionals to develop a basic understanding of various terms and accronyms used in Health IT.
:- SOWSIA Collaborative Group
Copyright 2008. SOWSIA Healthcare Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. (blog@sowsia.com) www.sowsia.com
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