WASHINGTON, April 8 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Harris
Corporation (NYSE: HRS), an international communications and
information technology company, has released the newest version of
CONNECT software to enable healthcare organizations to securely
exchange patient information on the Nationwide Health Information
Network (NHIN). CONNECT 2.4 offers key feature enhancements to the
open-source enterprise framework, compliance with updated NHIN
specifications, security improvements and progress toward
development platform neutrality.
The CONNECT solution was developed under contract for the
Federal Health Architecture (FHA) project within the Office of the
National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. The
CONNECT solution was featured in the Interoperability Showcase at
the recent Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society
conference in Atlanta,
Georgia.
The open-source CONNECT is being widely embraced as a health
information exchange solution for NHIN connectivity, with many
health enterprises abandoning proprietary solutions and opting
instead for the CONNECT open-source platform.
"For the seventh consecutive time, Harris has delivered the
CONNECT release on schedule and on budget, with full
functionality," said Jim Traficant,
vice president of Harris Healthcare Solutions. "The CONNECT
solution is improving healthcare quality, lowering costs and
accelerating access to care and benefits by integrating health
information across federal agencies and between federal agencies
and the private sector."
Additional benefits of CONNECT 2.4 include:
- Certificate revocation to ensure validity of participants.
- Universal client interface for patient discovery, which allows
users to search for a particular patient.
- Decreased memory consumption, improving performance when the
CONNECT gateway runs.
- Decreased compilation times, which improves performance when
participants create their implementations of the CONNECT
gateway.
The Social Security Administration was the first federal agency
to go live with CONNECT in February
2009, receiving data from private sector provider MedVA.
More recently, the Department of Defense and Department of
Veterans Affairs used CONNECT as the gateway to demonstrate the
ability to exchange live data over the NHIN with their private
sector partner, Kaiser-Permanente.
Harris — along with its teammates Agilex Technologies and
Scenpro — continues to foster and support the CONNECT Open
Source Community. CONNECT 2.4 builds upon the progress
already under way as part of CONNECT 2.3, including establishing
platform independence through a software baseline that allows
neutrality of Integrated Development Environments used by software
developers. This improvement will make it easier for users to
leverage contributions from the open-source community. The
team also migrated to a new web portal that is easier to update and
speeds response times, as well as supported a webinar for the
release of CONNECT 2.3 and an outlook for CONNECT 2.4.
"Open-source CONNECT is key to accelerating the national
priority of interoperable electronic health records and secure
health information exchange," said Traficant.
The CONNECT solution is sponsored by the FHA project within
Health and Human Services. FHA received the 2009 Information
Week's Government Innovator Award for the CONNECT solution and was
recognized as one of "10 Government Organizations that Understand
IT Innovation".
Harris Healthcare Solutions provides secure enterprise
intelligence solutions and services for government and commercial
customers — including systems integration, intelligent
infrastructure, advanced visualization and display, enterprise
digital content management and IT solutions. A leader in
federal healthcare IT integration, Harris products, systems and
services improve healthcare outcomes by assuring that critical
medical and benefits information is delivered with security and
privacy to the right person, on the right device, at the point of
care.
About Harris Corporation
Harris is an international communications and information
technology company serving government and commercial markets
worldwide. Headquartered in Melbourne, Florida, the company has
approximately $5 billion of annual
revenue and more than 15,000 employees — including nearly 7,000
engineers and scientists. Harris is dedicated to developing
best-in-class assured communications® products, systems, and
services. Additional information about Harris Corporation is
available at www.harris.com.
SOURCE Harris Corporation