Notes:
The Easy CHCS system provides a Web based interface into the CHCS server through EsiObjects data wrappers.
At the current time, the CHCS and VistA systems do not communicate with each other.
The Easy CHCS system has been modified to use CORBA for communications between the Application Server and the CHCS server. The EsiObjects CORBA ORB developed for the GCPR program is used to access the CHCS server object wrappers. The J2EE CORBA Orb (or other) is used on the Application Server. All data is served up in SOAP compliant XML format, that is, the CORBA application specification will be designed to use XML string representations of data.
The VistA database tier has been wrapped and exposed as objects using the EsiBuilder tools used to wrap the CHCS database tier. The CORBA ORB will provide access to the wrappers in exactly the same way it accesses the CHCS wrappers. This will enable access to the VistA system from the enterprise by other ORB enabled systems.
When the Provider Portal wants to access a patient, the Master Patient Index (MPI) is used to store the locations (systems) that contain a portion of the patient’s record. The MPI is accessed through an existing EsiObjects Person Identification Service (PIDS) interface. The client then uses these location pointers to retrieve data from each system. The data is then displayed via the Provider Portal Web Browser.
Normalizing the data via a lexicon was beyond the scope of this prototype. Additionally, a fully functional MPI was not implemented and all data elements will not be mapped. The current implementation is a prototype.