Connecting applications and systems takes time, involves a lot of people and requires training and deployment costs. What if it wasn’t that bad? What if you had an application messaging solution “in a box”? What if that box was a Cloud that allowed you to scale quickly and reduce costs?

Sounds great and it is!

That is what we have been working on here at CloudPrime and we are proud of the best service that allows you to connect disparate software applications on and off your network in an easy to install, scalable, and cost-effective way.

The CloudPrime service provides IT Managers and Administrators with a pre-built application network that resides in the Cloud and enables a network to be established in hours in some cases. Traditionally, if someone wanted to establish a connection between two systems, an IT administrator or manager would have to build a network between the two applications and implement an interface engine in the middle in order to allow the two endpoints to communicate.

Let’s review some of the challenges here:

1. In order to connect two applications on or off the network, personnel needs to be allocated to build those connections,

2. Hardware will need to be deployed to support the connection(s), also requiring more person hours to deploy, maintain and update,

3. Connections are rigid, allowing for only point-to-point communication,

4. In order to implement any value added services, either a 3rd party application provider will need to be brought in, or a RYO (Roll Your Own) solution will need to be built. Either way, this will require more support and more costs,

5. If the systems do not reside on the same network, it will be difficult to get trading partners to accept connections coming into their network for all the reasons above.

Let’s see how CloudPrime provides an easy-to-deploy solution to solve this problem:

1. CloudPrime is a service so no person hours will be need to be contributed to support the network,

2. As a service, there is no hardware for the end-user to purchase or support,

3. CloudPrime provides a small software client that interfaces to applications, encrypts messages and routes them through the appropriate channels,

4. CloudPrime’s service allows disparate applications to communicate without the need for an interface engine,

5. CloudPrime provides file-level tracking, guaranteed delivery, and a variety of other built-in value added services, enabling IT managers to meet compliance and avoid customization costs,

6. CloudPrime provides reporting tools to increase management’s visibility into application network performance and costs,

7. Since CloudPrime is easy to install, bringing up trading partners on and off your network is easy and can be done in as little as 20 minutes,

8. CloudPrime leverages the Cloud to scale with usage and provides users a cost-effective, pay-as-you-grow pricing model.

Discover how your organization can build meaningful application interfaces with CloudPrime by doing a trial of the product free for 30-Days!

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In this article I wanted to review how one could create a Health Information Exchange using CloudPrime. What this means in the most simple terms is that the CloudPrime application messaging network enables you to connect health care application endpoints to a central hub for the purpose of creating an electronic data interchange. This information exchange can send data back to all the constituents as well as connect out to another network outside the system.

Exhibit A below represents the network topography of CloudPrime when implemented in a hub-and-spoke configuration. As you can see, there is a centralized EHR that connects out to various hospitals, physician groups, clinical labs, and pharmacies. Each one of these endpoints communicates in a two-way message exchange back to the central EHR (or HIE, Head Quarters, etc.), encrypting all traffic over the network.

Exhibit A

 

This is achieved by installing what is called a “CP Connector” at each end-point that interfaces to the application that will be sending data. These Connectors are capable of picking up HL7, EDI X12, and Flat Files (to see a full list of Protocols Supported, please visit https://cloudprime.net) and passing them along to the destination connectors via the Cloud. What is important to note is how the messages travel over the network.

1. The messages are picked up and encrypted behind the endpoint’s firewall, ensuring all messages are sent securely,
2. Messages are sent over multiple paths to guarantee the arrival of each message, something we call Multi-Pathing,
3. Store and forward: A copy of each message is stored in the online data stores (in the Cloud) and persist until the message is delivered. Online storage is rules based, so CIOs and IT Managers can keep messages encrypted in the Cloud for as long as they want,
4. The first message that arrives at the destination will be decrypted and delivered to the appropriate file system directory or application interface. The connector automatically de-duplicates each message and destroys any message that arrives after the first.
5. All message transactions can be viewed in the CloudPrime portal for reporting and non-repudiation.

Deploy A Health Information Exchange Quickly

It can take as little as a month to deploy a CloudPrime Health Information Exchange, and once your network is established, adding new endpoints can be done in a matter of minutes.*

Below is a diagram of the simple steps required for downloading and installing a Connector at a new application endpoint.

Elapsed Time of Connector Installation

Once a Connector is installed, the user simply creates a connection (called Channels) interfacing to the source application and specifies the destination address on the CloudPrime network. Once this is done, the user can start sending messages back and forth to their trading partners on the network.

CloudPrime Channel Configuration Screen

CloudPrime makes it easy to create a secure, scalable and cost-effective health information exchange, connecting all the necessary dots on your network to achieve interoperability and compliance. To learn more about how you can begin using CloudPrime today to establish a Health Information Exchange on your network, contact us by emailing sales @ cloudprime dot net or calling .

* This is based on previous customer implementations. Experiences may vary depending on the requirements.

As a company that leverages Cloud infrastructure to provide cost-effective, scalable and secure application messaging services, I get a lot of questions about how we make the Cloud secure. Before I address this question, I figured it would be interesting to first take a look at the history of Cloud computing. I ask forgiveness in advance for all my gross-oversimplifications.

The Early Years

Cloud computing first started being described in the 60′s when the pioneers of ARPANET envisioned that people all of the world could connect and access data from each other over a network. Having an interconnected “web” would provide the foundation for distributed computing. Further, John McCarty, a noted computer scientist, proposed the idea of “computation being delivered as a public utility.” (ComputerWeekly.com, March 2009), much like it is used today.

Through the 80′s, the concept of a client-server model for operating applications and platforms within an enterprise began to take root and lay a foundation for what we recognize as “the Cloud” today. Client-server systems require that one computing appliance, ideally with a great amount of computing power and capacity, would be able to serve multiple clients (PC’s, terminals, etc.) around the world. One famous example of this in the 80′s was BITNET which connected IBM mainframes in order to send electronic mail to academic institutions around the world. (A brief history of the internet, Internet Society, 2010)

Emergence of Cloud Computing

Although the idea of a “Cloud” infrastructure was seeded in the 1960′s, it was not really until the 1990′s that we saw any semblance of Cloud computing the way we know it today. In the late 90′s, SalesForce pioneered one of the first SaaS (software as a service) CRM applications and boldly labeled their innovated business model as “The end of software” since you did not have to purchase and install an application locally.

Although it appeared that SaaS based software models would be the future of how we used and interfaced with applications, these applications were still hosted in server farms or locally by the companies that published the software. In 2006, Amazon.com launched a new service that would change how we thought about hosted computing and helped catapult Cloud computing into the spotlight.

Cloud Computing Evolved

Amazon’s EC2 environment gives developers and software publishers a way to access what seems like unlimited resources in a “pay for what you use” model. This combination of low cost and scalable server resources made it possible for developers with very little money to develop applications and publish them (very quickly!) for the community to use. While this was a great milestone for developers and just about anyone who has ever used the internet, many people, businesses, and experts did not believe that the Cloud could provide the security and reliability needed to run enterprise grade applications.

While Amazon provides a paid public service (much like the one anticipated by John McCarthy), many users of the Cloud leverage what is called a “Private Cloud”. This generally means that the host of the distributed computing center has created a cloud environment but its resources are not made publicly available. Bringing the Cloud internally allows managers to have more control over security and maintenance, instead of relying on a provider. Private Clouds help satisfy many of the concerns IT Managers and CIOs have around security while allowing them to take advantage of the benefits of Cloud computing. Eric Knorr of InfoWorld has a great article here discussing “Private Clouds”.

Cloud Computing Today

Today, there is a wide range of options for developers and publishers of software when evaluating which Cloud provider they will use to host their applications. Companies like Microsoft and IBM have started offering services providing their customers with “elastic cloud” environments that promise services that are scalable, easy to access, and inexpensive to use. Seeing more and more large players, as well as small and medium size boutique cloud providers enter the market is a signal that more and more companies are adopting the Cloud as an acceptable infrastructure for hosting their data and applications.

CloudPrime Leverages the Cloud

CloudPrime is a service that leverages* the Cloud for many of the same reasons any other business might. The Cloud provides a scalable, cost-effective and on-demand environment through which we can provide our application messaging services. When people ask how it is that we can leverage the Cloud when it is not secure, the answer is two fold:

1. We only work with Cloud providers that can pass SAS 70 type II compliance, and

2. CloudPrime encrypts all messages over the network, making all data traveling through and stored on the Cloud completely secure

Having an infrastructure that can scale as you grow allows our business to provide a rich and robust service without you incurring large up-front costs or expensive service fees for transferring data between local and hosted applications. You can learn more about CloudPrime and our services by visiting https://cloudprime.net

* CloudPrime uses the Cloud as a component of its service and an overview of the CP Messaging Topography can be seen here: https://cloudprime.net