InterSystems Global Summit 2011

InterSystems Innovator Award

Innovator Logo The InterSystems Innovator Awards honor developers who use our technology in new ways to create unique applications and integrated solutions for their markets. The winning development teams get cash awards and have their innovative solutions publicized on our Website and in the media.

We would like to thank all the companies that submitted applications to the InterSystems Innovator Awards Program.

A panel of industry analysts has picked the winning solutions.

First Place - OPTALERT
OPTALERT Fatigue Risk Profiler

Second Place - Credit Suisse
AGORA – Global Equity Trading Order Management Platform

Third Place - Mater Health Services
Mater Electronic Health Record (EHR) Platform

Student Innovator Award - Markus Lamprecht, Thomas Nitzsche, Alexander Apel, and advisor Dr. Anke Häber
CommIT Health

1st Place Innovator Award Winner

Organization: OPTALERT
Country: Australia
Solution: OPTALERT Fatigue Risk Profiler

The Optalert Fatigue Risk Profiler is a software-as-a-service solution that promises to ensure operator alertness, guarding against what may be the single greatest cause of transportation and industrial accidents. Fatigue Risk Profiler leverages a number of InterSystems technologies and real-time bio-information to solve a pressing real-world need.

The facts on fatigued drivers are sobering, to say the least. For example, studies show that going without sleep for 17 hours has the same effect on driving ability as a Blood Alcohol Concentration (BAC) of .05. Being awake for 36 hours has the same effect as a BAC of 0.1.

The OPTALERT Alertness Monitoring System works by measuring the velocity of a driver’s eyelid 500 times a second. To do this, the driver must wear his or her OPTALERT glasses (with a safe and tiny invisible light emitter and receiver built into the frame). This measurement is translated into a score from 0 to 10 that the driver sees inside the cab of his or her vehicle on the OPTALERT Dashboard Indicator.

This same score and corresponding low, medium or high risk profile is transmitted via mobile internet and displayed online by the OPTALERT Fatigue Risk Profiler. The easy-to-understand graphic user interface of the Fatigue Risk Profiler intuitively enables managers and control room operators to quickly identify, track and monitor the fatigue risk profile of many drivers all at the same time.

The OPTALERT Fatigue Risk Profiler was developed using InterSystems Caché to store the massive amounts of data used for company reporting, trend analysis, and to detect opportunities for improvement. It uses Caché ObjectScript for business logic and processing. The user interface was developed using InterSystems’ ZEN with special graphic components developed using SVG capabilities of ZEN technology, while data interfaces to vehicle metric devices were created by enabling Caché database methods as Web Services.

As a result of their innovative use of InterSystems’ advanced software technologies, OPTALERT was able to change the business model of the company from just selling a piece of equipment, to selling a subscription service that adds annuity to OPTALERT’s revenue stream.

More importantly, OPTALERT empowers people and the companies they work for with independent scientifically validated technology to monitor, measure and manage fatigue in the workplace – increasing productivity, mitigating risk, and saving lives.

2nd Place Innovator Award Winner

Organization: Credit Suisse
Country: USA
Solution: AGORA – Global Equity Trading Order Management Platform

Traders in global financial markets require up-to-the-second information and instantaneous execution. The Credit Suisse “AGORA” marketplace puts the InterSystems Caché database to work in a new way, handling very high equity trading volumes -- the third highest in the world – and stands ready to handle even higher volumes in the future.

The nature of trading has changed as “high frequency” and “algorithmic” trading now dominate trading volumes. For example, the U.S. average daily reported trading volume has increased dramatically in recent years, from about 3 billion shares per day in 2003 to nearly 10 billion shares per day in 2009. AGORA was created to meet global equities markets’ increased demand for high-throughput, low-latency electronic trading. Over 250 global applications and thousands of users rely on AGORA for order management and order routing, with AGORA driving trade capture, booking, position management, trade reporting, and exchange connectivity.

In building AGORA, Credit Suisse made innovative use of Caché as an in-memory database and distributed cache. Caché’s light C++ binding provides high speed in-memory access that allows AGORA to insert/update 25,000 transactions/sec into Caché. High availability and data persistence are critical goals that were achieved using a combination of hardware and software fault-tolerant implementations.

In addition, through the use of Enterprise Cache Protocol (ECP), Caché’s built-in support for dynamic distributed data caching, and Caché’s full SQL support, AGORA is able to provide distributed caching and data access layer abstraction to minimize changes to over 250 applications on the trading platform.

Credit Suisse has realized tangible benefits from AGORA:

A 10X increase in throughput and capacity

Reduced transactional latency and cost per trade
The bottom line on data center foot print and costs were reduced by 50%
The application has significantly improved overall trading data management and simplified the infrastructure

AGORA at Credit Suisse uses advanced technology from InterSystems and innovative approaches to deliver its next generation high-performance global trading platform.

3rd Place Innovator Award Winner

Organization: Mater Health Services
Country: Australia
Solution: Mater Electronic Health Record (EHR) Platform

In the past, hospitals and IDNs have typically adopted a “best-of-breed” philosophy when purchasing clinical and patient information software. And this approach can work well – until there is a desire to overlay an Electronic Health Record. Then they are faced with challenge of creating a consolidated view of information housed in very different, specialized systems, built on a variety of technologies. Mater Health Services, which manages 7 hospitals located in the southern suburbs of Brisbane and throughout the state of Queensland, Australia, met this challenge by building an “EHR Platform”, based on InterSystems Caché and InterSystems Ensemble.

The Mater EHR Platform provides the foundation for the implementation of the EHR at the Mater Health Services and consists of the following components:

A clinical data repository, which provides a data repository of clinical and administrative data from the multiple disparate silos of information systems distributed across the “best-of-breed” environment at the Mater Health Services.
An integration service and custom routing engine, which provides HL7 messaging between the best-of-breed information systems and the interface hub.
An identity matching solution, which supports an enterprise-wide patient master index (PMI) that ensures unique identification of patients – an integral part of patient care.

Using the EHR Platform, Mater Health Services is in the process of developing and rolling out a number of deliverables. These include a clinical portal that uses IP Health’s Verdi (Virtual Electronic Record Data Integrator) as its user interface, the Mater Doctor Portal, the Patient Master Index, the Health Provider Database, appointment reminders, electronic creation of pathology and radiology orders, and a result acknowledgement solution, among other capabilities. They are using Ensemble’s flexible development environment to create and improve new features based on user feedback.

The Mater EHR Platform uses a broad array of Caché and Ensemble features and capabilities, including HL7 Adapters, Web services, the Ensemble Workflow Portal, Zen Reports, and InterSystems’ Identity Management Technology.

A fast, reliable and complete electronic health record system is the central nervous system of a modern health care institution. Mater Health Services has built such a system with Caché. What's more, Ensemble plays a huge role in integrating myriad applications with the Mater EHR System so that some 500,000 patients annually can receive efficient and high-quality care.

Student Innovator Award Winner

Team: Markus Lamprecht, Thomas Nitzsche, Alexander Apel, and advisor Dr. Anke Häber
University: Westsächsische Hochschule Zwickau (WHZ), University of Applied Sciences
Country: Germany
Solution: CommIT Health

In health care IT, there is plenty of data. But too often, this data is isolated and not accessible where and when it’s needed. The result: wasted time and money spent retrieving data, not to mention compromised care. “Communication Infrastructure for eHealth (CommIT Health),” a project at the Westsächsische Hochschule Zwickau (WHZ), University of Applied Sciences, addresses this need head-on.

Based on InterSystems Ensemble and Caché, CommIT Health uses a modular architecture to accomplish many tasks. These include: enabling the use of ID cards to quickly retrieve health care records across different systems; the integration of health care data across different hospitals and nursing facilities; elimination of the need to manually input data multiple times; and using IT to map geriatric care.

CommIT Health also uses Caché Server Pages, Zen Reports, and Dashboards to retrieve and present information in a clear and actionable manner. In addition, CommIT Health uses adapters to connect different systems, BPEL to support advanced business processes, and Web Services to connect to SAP.

Health care IT professionals worldwide can learn from CommIT Health. Markus Lamprecht, Thomas Nitzsche, Alexander Apel and advisor Prof. Dr. Anke Häber are to be highly commended for their work on this project.