Portfolio: Enterprise Application Architecture

Allscripts, an electronic medical records (EMR) software vendor, and Medem, a physician-patient portal application service provider, announced ambitious plans to integrate their products, but after several false starts had made little progress. The EMR vendor then brought Flying Aces in to kick-start the software engineering effort. Flying Aces met with the portal vendor and developed technology prototypes to flesh out the technology and integration issues. Over the next months we led the development of the gateway and served as the liaison between the EMR and portal development teams.

The gateway used Web Services, WS-Security and PKI to send registration, scheduling, prescription and patient education transactions between the physician's local EMR system and the patient's web-based portal. The gateway featured sophisticated diagnostic and monitoring instrumentation to enable technical support and problem diagnosis.

United Airlines was an early leader in electronic distribution, allowing customers to purchase tickets using a disk-based client/server product, "United Connection." To continue their lead in electronic distribution, United asked Flying Aces Technology to join their WebConnection project to introduce the functionality of "United Connection" to the Web. Flying Aces led the effort in selecting the vendor, identifying requirements, writing the RFP and evaluating the responses. Once the vendor was selected, Flying Aces prototyped, designed and implemented the gateway between the web site and United's mainframe-based Mileage Plus system. The gateway was implemented using C, HP-UX, BEA System's Tuxedo/Connect, COBOL and CICS.

Using the industry standard messaging protocol HL7, Flying Aces has deployed numerous application interfaces integrating the disparate applications within hospitals. Typical deployments include a web-based physician portal allowing physicians a single consolidated view of the patient's clinical information.