The Healthcare IT Guy

We’ve been having a nice discussion on the management of services and how services should be versioned on our Microsoft Architect MVP discussion list. This morning I saw a note from Martin Fowler pointing to an article on Consumer-driven Contracts. The article is definitely worth reading, and here’s the abstract:

This article discusses some of the challenges in evolving a community of service providers and consumers. It describes some of the coupling issues that arise when service providers change parts of their contract, particularly document schemas, and identifies two well-understood strategies - adding schema extension points and performing “just enough” validation of received messages - for mitigating such issues. Both strategies help protect consumers from changes to a provider contract, but neither of them gives the provider any insight into the ways it is being used and the obligations it must maintain as it evolves. Drawing on the assertion-based language of one of these mitigation strategies - the “just enough” validation strategy - the article then describes the “Consumer-Driven Contract” pattern, which imbues providers with insight into their consumer obligations, and focuses service evolution around the delivery of the key business functionality demanded by consumers.

Reuters reports that Wal-Mart is planning to open 400 in-store clinics in the next few years, climbing to about 2000 within the next 7 years. They said that Wal-Mart plans to contract with local hospitals to provide the personnel and service and that made me curious. What are the IT implications and opportunities here? Could Wal-Mart become a pseudo-RHIO in some areas since it will need to have some connectivity with hospitals, labs, and other ancillary service providers? What new tools could we build that we could sell to Wal-Mart to make some that easier? Are there open source tools that could be built and tailored specifically for this kind of retail clinic use? Any and all ideas are welcome, lets see if we can even get Wal-Mart interested to talk with us here.

We’ve probably all heard about the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) but I’ve been playing with Microsoft’s new Internet Service Bus and like the idea. Instead of installing an ESB within your own firm (which is not a trivial job), you can use a publicly hosted service bus infrastructure managed by Microsoft. With a good identity federation architecture, the security is “good enough” for most uses and you should check it out. This is not the same kind of neat stuff we’re seeing from Amazon (like S3 and their cloud services) but it’s a good direction for Microsoft which is really behind the 8 ball on hosted services in general.

See BizTalk Services Goes Live.

I love all things Google, especially Google Talks where they have smart guys presenting tech topics to Google staff and they record it for the rest of us to view later. Recently I ran across this video on privacy preserving data mining. Seems like an esoteric topic, but it’s important to us all in healthcare for sharing data without revealing private information. The speaker it talking about data mining for internet traffic but all the algorithms are useful in our industry, too.

A recent posting at One Man’s Blog offers tips for choosing passwords by showing how simple it is to crack some passwords. Here’s a quick excerpt from his blog: