Foreword
In its 14 short years, BizTalk Server has grown to serve as the premier integration solution for more than 12,000 companies around the world including 81 percent of the Fortune Global 100 companies in various industries including many in healthcare.
Whether they are providers, payers, in clinical services or life sciences, organizations in the healthcare industry face challenges caused by decades of niche systems, changing regulations, shrinking budgets, acquisitions as well as disaggregation, and demanding consumers. Core to enabling this integration is the BizTalk Accelerator for HL7. It is a highly versatile and performant complete health care solution for the exchange of data between health care computer applications based on the Health Level Seven (HL7) standard. We think integrated hospitals ensure better and faster care. BizTalk enables many scenarios in health care like integrating Electronic Health Records (EHR), digitizing clinical dashboards, optimizing clinical supplies and automating patient scheduling.
In this recent release of BizTalk Server, Microsoft has made deep investments in performance improvements, cloud and hybrid cloud scenarios.
An example to illustrate the scale we see specifically in the healthcare industry is with HCA, the leading provider of healthcare services in the United States. HCA is a company composed of locally managed facilities that includes about 165 hospitals and 115 freestanding surgery centers in 20 states and England. Today, the system handles an average of 23,000,000 messages per day, average, with a high of 49.7 million message (at a rate of 266 messages per second).
We see continued investment with BizTalk in enabling complex on premise integration scenarios at scale and enabling the hybrid cloud solutions in healthcare.
I am certainly delighted to be asked to write the forward for this book. Howard and I had the great opportunity to collaborate at the quarterly HL7 Working Group meetings. Connectathons for the emerging standard FHIR are held the weekends leading up to the working group meetings. Howard has been an early adopter in proving integration scenarios using BizTalk, and Microsoft Online Services like O365 and Microsoft Azure and FHIR. You will be able to gain practical insights from this book.
—Leslie Sistla
Director, Technology Strategy | Worldwide Health Industry
Leslie Sistla is a Director of Technology Strategist on the Worldwide Health Industry Team. Leslie joined Microsoft Corp in 2000 bringing with her experiences working for Oracle Corp and McKesson (HBOC).
At Microsoft, Leslie helps customers and partners around the world understand how they can meet their privacy, security and regulatory compliance obligations with solutions built on the Microsoft platform, both mobile and cloud. She represents Microsoft at healthcare key Standards Development Organizations working group meetings, like HL7, and IHE. Finally, she works with customers and partners, helping design solutions framed by using a healthcare reference architecture, the Connected Health Framework (CHF).