Connected Health Framework Architecture and Design Blueprint Updated

Microsoft has made an updated version of the Connected Health Framework (CHF) Architecture and Design Blueprint available to customers at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) 2009 Annual Conference & Exhibition. Accompanying the updated release of CHF are new solution accelerators delivered for the Connected Health Platform (CHP). The new releases contribute to enhancing the level of interoperability for the next-generation e-health solutions, the Redmond company explains.

In this manner, Microsoft is adapting not only flagship products such as Windows and Office to the realities of customers running mixed source environments, but also its healthcare offerings. “In today’s IT environments, heterogeneity is a reality, and we recognize that collaboration is critical to building and managing technologies that will work well for customers in these environments,” said Tim Smokoff, general manager of the Worldwide Public Sector Healthcare division at Microsoft.

The Redmond company emphasized that the second version of CHF was designed to focus on lifelong well-being, while spanning across all possible aspects of care and the persons and organizations involved. CHF provides customers with the necessary resources for them to build platform-agnostic healthcare solutions.

According to Microsoft, CHF v2 brings to the table “support [for] both social care and lifelong well-being scenarios; [a] focus on the needs of families, care professionals, care providers and the funders of care services; [CHF also] includes the use of federation methods for identity management, authentication, authorization and data integration; enables legacy applications to participate in the service-oriented architecture of the CHF; [and] provides more use case examples and step-by-step design guidance.”

Coupled with the revised guidelines of CHF, the Connected Health Platform helps health organizations maximize the benefits and reduce the cost of designing, building, deploying and operating the Microsoft platform and its infrastructure capabilities in their solutions or environment.

In addition to the updated CHF, the CHP has grown to contain no less than 55 solution accelerators, including guidance and tools set up to streamline the process of designing, developing, integrating and running the Microsoft platform in an IT environment.