AFHIL Lab

As a leading innovator of Health IT solutions, SMS and our partners have invested in the Advanced Federal Health Innovations Lab (AFHIL) to research and examine technologies, processes, and clinical workflows that have the greatest impact on our client's healthcare operations.

The Advanced Federal Healthcare Innovation Lab (AFHIL) environment is used to develop, prototype and demonstrate innovative solutions to pressing business issues for our Veterans Affairs and Military Health clients. Our investment in the AFHIL lab promotes and fosters high impact innovations for VA and MHS including enhancement of VistA/AHLTA interoperability and evolution into a service-oriented architecture (SOA). In developing these solutions, SMS and our partners develop innovative approaches to discover and overcome real-world challenges. Within AFHIL, we follow three to five month innovation cycles that have answered questions including:

• What would it take to enable legacy systems to participate in an emerging SOA environment and enable incremental migration and co-existence?
• Can technologies and processes facilitate a single sign-on and access method for both VA and DoD physicians in a common environment?
• What are the challenges in running VistA on various hardware and OS solutions including virtualization?

Latest Innovations:

• Stand-up of Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) development and testing environment – allowing for further VA/DoD/Purchased Care interoperability innovation.
• Stand-up of AHLTA development and testing environments – allowing for Wounded Warrior innovation.
• Bar Code Medication Administration (BCMA) re-factoring research to alleviate performance issues – one of the primary issues complicating regionalization of VistA.
• Simplified patient appointment scheduling in VistA through incremental modernization – leverages existing VA technologies combined with legacy-enabling technologies.
• Registry/repository implementation for governance of services – better visibility to actual services available within VA's SOA; precursor to user-based orchestration of services.

Previous Innovations:

• EHR/PHR Interoperability – Linking VistA medical records to Google Health Personal Health Record (PHR) and linking Google Health PHR data to VistA medical records
• Abstracted User Provisioning – Provisioning of role-based access from a central point, propagated to applications
• CPRS Evolution – Pharmacy Order Entry Service proof of concept and clinical business service (Allergies) re-use across applications
• Service Enabling Legacy VistA – Service "wrappers" extend the usefulness and life of VistA/CPRS legacy functions to enable participation in the evolving HealtheVet SOA without massive rewrites of code (multiple innovations)
• Identity and Access Management – VA and DoD smart card (PIV and CAC) authentication and Single Sign-on extension via a common web based user interface
• Real Time Location System – Real Time Location System (RTLS) solution for hospitals based on RFID and IR technology
• Provider Virtualization – Stateless thin-client access to legacy and re-engineered applications leveraging PIV/CAC authentication
• Sandbox Virtualization – Uses virtualization technologies to rapidly stage, deploy, and reset test and development environments
• Alternative Platforms for VistA – Demonstrates VA's VistA environment operating on alternate hardware/software platforms (Sparc/Solaris, x86/Linux, x86/Windows)
• Platform Benchmarking – Uses VistA/CPRS test beds with an industry standard performance tool to allow meaningful "apples to apples" comparison
• Portal/Portlet Framework – Framework for rapidly modernizing existing VA applications using industry standard non-proprietary technologies (multiple innovations)
• Purchased Care Interoperability – Enables electronic referral and authorization sharing between Military Treatment Facilities and purchased care network providers

While we do not intend to directly sell these innovations as products in and of themselves, we have and will continue to use the knowledge and credibility gained in the lab to bring lower risk solutions to bear in the work we do for our clients.

The primary goals of the AFHIL lab are:

• To increase organizational and programmer productivity.
• To shorten the development timelines for all projects.
• To improve quality by reducing errors and eliminating rewrites.
• To reduce costs in both development and in operations.

Our Partners

Our partners in AFHIL (list below) have invested in the establishment, operations, and innovations of the lab.