Spacelabs Medical's Web of Patient Records

by Janet Hughes

With locations in more than 90 countries and headquarters in Redmond, Washington, Spacelabs Medical is a leading provider of integrated healthcare information systems and medical devices. The company has developed leading-edge physiological monitoring and information products for 40 years. Today, these products help physicians and nurses care for their patients and effectively manage the quality and cost of healthcare.

The Problem

Spacelabs Medical is currently building a patient record viewer in Java that will allow physicians to pull data from different, disparate databases that could be spread across a single hospital or multiple hospitals across the country. The medical records for one patient are often contained on separate databases-for example, part of the record might be on a Windows NT-based radiology system, a UNIX-based laboratory system, and a Macintosh point-of-care system. As a result, physicians typically find it difficult and time-consuming to gather relevant information they need in order to develop a care plan for a patient. The application that Spacelabs Medical is developing is intended to eliminate many of the challenges caregivers face when attempting to collate critical, time-sensitive data.    

Steve Wimmer, product development manager at Spacelabs Medical, says, "We began looking at Internet tools to aid us in creating our telemedicine product. We used Microsoft's J++ for a while, but began looking at other products when we discovered some shortcomings in the product's adherence to industry standards. "Our primary concern, however, was to be sure to find a product that would continue to be compatible with all the platforms our application would need to support-which includes the entire spectrum of PCs," he continues. "We didn't want to develop a product that would limit our customers in any way."

The Solution

After carefully studying its architecture and capabilities, Spacelabs Medical decided on Symantec's Visual Caf‚ 2.5 for Java, Professional Development Edition. "Because Visual Caf‚ adheres to industry standards, it provides a multiplatform, custom rapid application development environment that has enabled us to build an application that will be compatible with our clients' systems and with our own patient monitoring software systems today as well as tomorrow," Wimmer says.

According to Wimmer, Visual Caf‚ also excels in flexibility and speed.     "With Visual Caf‚, you can work in either visual or source-code editing modes. In fact, while you're working in source-code mode, you can use the 'RAD on' option on the fly to switch to forms-based automatic code generation so you can drag and drop components," he says. "It is a superior user interface.     "In addition, Visual Caf‚ also has a powerful compiler," he continues. "We're using the JIT compiler right now and our benchmarking indicates that the code the JIT compiler generates is the fastest."     Now 12 months into the project, Wimmer says Visual Caf‚ has not only helped shorten development time but, perhaps more importantly, it has provided Spacelabs Medical with an Internet tool that doesn't lock them and their customers into a solution that will limit future strategic product offerings and stifle business growth. Janet Hughes is a freelance writer and editor based in Utah.