Introduction
Synex developments in Geneva are strongly related to a governmental project: the IRIS regional healthcare network.
The main goal of this regional healthcare network is to reduce the cost of healthcare, Geneva being a canton of Switzerland where the costs of healthcare is amongst the highest. To achieve this goal, the IRIS network will have to support the following activities:
1. enabling sharing of patient records between healthcare actors (GPs, public and private hospitals, home care, etc.);
2. providing a fast and efficient access to medical literature supporting the healthcare process;
3. providing a tool for supporting the relationships between all actors of the process (e.g. healthcare insurances, drugstores, etc.).
In addition, it is expected that the network will enable the patients themselves to access their patient record from home.
Although SYNEX origin is slightly anterior to this regional project, it is interesting to see how close are the goals of both initiatives! The Synex Project in Geneva can therefore be seen as the first concrete developments for this regional healthcare
YNAPSES SERVER
The main technical contribution by IBEX was the development of the Synapses Server.This jointly with the HUG and used in production at the hospital.
This Synapses Server mirrors part of the information contained in the Intranet Synapses Server, which is in production since end of 1999. The Synapses Server currently runs on the Windows NT platform, although it was able to run on the Unix oplatform also.
A detailed technical description of the Synapses Server is available on request.
OTHER IBEX CONTRIBUTIONS
1. Participated in development and standardization of SynEx DTD
2. Implementated DTD inside ITASCA Synapses Server
3. Participated in SynEx marketing and technical meetings
4. Created public relations effort including setting up interviews for press articles, TV coverage
5. Contacted several potential distributors and end users of SynEx servers
6. Developed and presented SynEx on-line demonstrator to potential partners
ASSESSMENT AND FUTURE WORK
The most used service at HUG is a subset of the Synapses server: this server is in fact divided into two parts: an aggregation subcomponent acting as a high speed cache to patient data and an object-oriented subcomponent implementing the Synapses services and object model.
The cache subcomponent (AMU Architecture Middleware-Unifiée - Patient Record Cache), was created joinly by IBEX and HUG. This subcomponent has been in production at HUG since December 1999, and is serving hundreds of clients. It is loaded with more than 10'000 patient records representing the 'current' and 'recent' patients in the hospital and is currently serving more than 10'000 requests per day (it is designed for being able to answer within one second to up to 600 requests).
MARKETED PRODUCTS
The Synapses server is commercialised by IBEX Knowledge Systems as two complementary products:
1. The federation and caching part of the system which is supported and maintained by IBEX at the HUG is also marketed by IBEX under the name product name FAST
2. The work on SynExml has been included in IBEX's flagship Knowledge Management product ProjectVista (see
http://www.ibex.ch).
