Background
Founded in 1959, the University Hospital Ghent (UZ Ghent) is the second largest
hospital in Flanders, Belgium. With a staff of over five thousand people and more
than a thousand beds, the hospital delivers acute and extensive services to over
a thousand patients a day. The hospital is also a center for scientific research
and medical training for doctors to become medical specialists.
Business opportunity
UZ Ghent required a single portal to organize and share information about the treatment
and care of its patients. The portal would consolidate an existing Internet site,
Intranet site, and Extranet site into a one-stop service center that would facilitate
collaboration and provide easy access to the services that each target group needs:
- Patients and families want to locate doctors, make appointments, request medical
records, and pay bills online.
- Medical professionals and hospital staff want secure, reliable access to Electronic
Medical Records (EMR) and mission-critical applications that support surgeries and
other medical procedures.
- External healthcare professionals want to make referrals, request consultations,
transfer patient medical information, and access continuing education programs.
- Researchers and students need to exchange knowledge, best practices, and learning
experiences with team members.
Requirements
UZ Ghent required an enterprise portal solution that, first and foremost, offered
maximum reliability, availability, scalability, and security. It had to integrate
a customized .NET application framework, a picture archiving and communication solution
(PACS) from GE based on .NET 1.1, fourteen Visual Basic applications, more than
one hundred terabytes of online data stored in an Oracle database, and an open LDAP
repository that provides uniform user access to hospital facilities, applications,
and data. The solution also had to be able to be put into production on the hospital
data center, which runs on virtualized and non-virtualized Dell servers and is 75
percent Windows and 25 percent Linux.
The portal solution also had to meet regional and national goals, by providing and
integrating with a flexible, service oriented architecture that would share patients'
EMRs with other hospitals. It also had to be built, maintained, and enhanced over
time by the hospital's in-house team of .NET developers.
Decision process
The hospital considered two portal solutions: Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 and
IBM WebSphere Portal. Explained Bart Sijnave, CIO of UZ Ghent, "SharePoint was most
logical choice because we had standardized on .NET development. However, SharePoint
was a new technology, and it was not well proven in the marketplace. The scalability
was not what we wanted. The availability could not be guaranteed."
Also, SharePoint had only a limited capacity to integrate non-Microsoft technologies.
This became problematic as it had to be able to synchronize LDAP directories, and
employ an identity management tool to synchronize user directories.
While WebSphere Portal was already extensively proven as an enterprise portal, it
also had several issues. First, in 2005, UZ Ghent standardized on .NET development,
and the IT organization wanted to maintain this development strategy going forward.
If it selected a WebSphere solution, it would require the ability to maintain and
enhance its capabilities using .NET development technologies.
The University Hospital Ghent also wanted to extend WebSphere Portal's infrastructure
services, such as branding, navigation, and composite application development to
its .NET-based information, applications, and services.
IBM introduced the hospital to Mainsoft, Portal Edition. This software enables development
teams using Microsoft technologies to integrate .NET applications in WebSphere Portal.
Using a plug-in for the popular Visual Studio development environment, it takes
code developed using .NET languages and translates it to Java JEE code that runs
natively as JSR 168 portlets on WebSphere Portal.
In a proof of concept, Mainsoft integrated 15,000 lines of UZ Ghent's existing Visual
Basic code into WebSphere Portal in about an hour. Based on this validation of the
technology, the hospital selected WebSphere Portal and Mainsoft, Portal Edition,
for its enterprise portal platform.
Implementation
UZ Ghent is employing a three-phase plan for using Microsoft .NET technologies to
build out its WebSphere Portal. Phase 1, the online implementation of the portal
Internet sites and integration of more than 500,000 lines of VB.NET code, was completed
in six months in February 2008. Thereafter, information updates will be carried
out using a Web-based content management system.
In Phase 2, electronic patient data exchange and content management will include
integrated search functionality, access control and single sign-on to existing applications,
and transactional services. Services for content and knowledge management and security
will be based on eID-technology. This phase is scheduled for delivery at the end
of 2008. Lastly, Phase 3 will federate University Hospital Ghent's WebSphere Portal
with affiliated hospitals and other hospitals throughout the country.
Conclusion
IBM WebSphere Portal using Mainsoft's Portal Edition was the only solution that
met all of the business and technical requirements for the University Hospital Ghent.
In particular, Mainsoft's Portal Edition enabled the hospital to utilize existing
code, Microsoft applications, and .NET technical skills to target an IBM-based enterprise
portal solution that today serves a large and diverse community of users.
"With the portal implementation, I threw away my bias that you need to make a firm
decision between .NET and Java development because with Mainsoft, the gap between
the two of them is so small," said Sijnave. "I would advise anyone who is confronted
with interoperability issues to consider Mainsoft because it's so easy to make .NET
and Java code work together."
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