How Java can change health?

In Brazil, every citizen has the right to full healthcare, from primary care to complex procedures as heart transplants, for free, any place in the country. With a population of 180 million people, information is the key to better distribute resources and provide better healthcare.

Taking advantage of the Java based infrastructure of the Brazilian National Health Card, in 2003 a huge project was started aiming to build an integrated web based application to collect patient encounter information, to regulate complex procedures authorizations and to build an integrated patient scheduling system that would allow to schedule consultations and medical procedures in any health provider. This reduces the waiting time, organizes the flow of patients, and greatly improves the quality of care.

The challenge was to build a quality application in a short time frame. This presentation will focus on how J2EE technology was extensively used to build this mission-critical application and to achieve the level of integration needed. Using J2EE technologies such as EJB, Servlets, JSP, JMS, JTA, and JAAS, it was possible to create a robust and high performance application, with a high level of reuse and flexibility.
From the time the first use case was specified to the time the information system was deployed, only four months had elapsed and 2.5 million lines of code were produced. As a result, this project won the Duke?s Choice Award at JavaOne 2005.

This session will share the experience of building such a system, showing how it was designed, the challenges, the problems, what changed in the health system once it was deployed, and show the importance of the decision on using a standard based and multi-platform architecture, that allows several independent teams to augment the information system,
adding value to it and improving the quality of care.

Speaker

• Fabiane Bizinella Nardon