Healthcare/Insurance Baptist Health Return to Success Story List Contact: Baptist Health Systems of Florida 8900 North Kendall Drive Miami, FL 33176 U.S.A. Tools Used: Inprise’s Visibroker™, MIRACLE™, CORBA® Medical Information Retrieval Application Problem: The main challenge of the Baptist Health project was to integrate the wide array of data sources, data types, and complex workflow patterns inherent in the healthcare industry, without requiring a single entity to have the broad domain knowledge necessary to manage this variety of clinical data from all sources. Philips needed to build an application that would leverage departmental expertise, and provide a comprehensive view of these complex, disparate systems to the primary physician – while at the same time assuring the integrity and confidentiality of the patients' records. Solution: Baptist Health Systems of South Florida, a not-for-profit healthcare organization composed of five hospitals, multiple outpatient clinics, and many physicians' offices, spotlighted its next-generation medical information system, MIRACLE. Designed and developed by Philips Medical Systems, Care Flow Net, Inc., and Baptist Health to streamline patient services, the Medical Information Retrieval Application for Clinical Enhancement (MIRACLE) is being built around Inprise's VisiBroker CORBA object request broker technology. MIRACLE represents the next generation in healthcare Information Technology by providing caregivers tightly controlled access to medical data anywhere, at any time. An intelligent solution such as MIRACLE allows healthcare workers to store and access relevant information quickly. In addition, hospital IT departments save time and resources by not having to constantly correct the messaging and replication errors common with previous non-CORBA based solutions. Using Inprise's VisiBroker ORB to link disparate data sources, and Inprise's JBuilder visual development tool to help build customized Java interfaces, MIRACLE is showing great potential to minimize costs and human effort. Future and continuing development efforts will have MIRACLE processing increasing amounts of data and presenting it in formats modified for each user's needs. "As managed care becomes the dominant paradigm in healthcare, providers are looking for ways to optimize and integrate their existing systems to allow for efficient, accurate IT support for diagnosis and treatment," said Kent Wreder, corporate director of object technology, Baptist Health Systems. "Recent advances in distributed object computing, such as enhanced security, will allow us to build a system to connect numerous physicians, hospital clinic and outpatient systems. Such instant access to real-time patient information will result in faster processing, more accurate assessments, better care for the patient and marked savings for the provider." "Inprise's ORB technology has allowed Philips Medical Systems to encapsulate data from the numerous sources required to make the application effective," said Bob Glicksman, director, MedGRID Program, Philips Medical Systems. "We chose VisiBroker for its excellent performance, compatibility with CORBA standards, and its high level of interoperability. Because we must interface with many systems from a variety of vendors, interoperability is a big issue with us. We have been extremely pleased with the high level of conformance to standards and interoperability of VisiBroker." Richard Soley, chairman and CEO of the OMG said, "Hospitals bring true meaning to the phrase 'mission critical,' so it's no surprise that when Baptist Health Systems needed reliability for its mission-critical MIRACLE project, it chose a CORBA backbone. CORBA allows Baptist Health to tie its existing systems together so that critical patient information can be accessed anywhere on the enterprise, allowing for much more efficient use of resources -- efficiency that really counts in the time-sensitive field of healthcare. MIRACLE proves that CORBA is the solution for building secure, scalable, reliable distributed systems."