Improving the management and delivery of care is the current buzz for the Healthcare IT segment. There has been a paradigm shift from healthcare focus to health and wellness focus. A survey conducted by HIMSS showed that the major reasons for not implementing healthcare technology are:

• Lack of capital for investing in technology - Cost has been one of the main diffidence for healthcare providers to adopt technology into their practice. This is also because of the uncertain cost-benefit access and high maintenance cost involved in the use of technology.

• Less staff to adopt the technology - Not many in a practice especially of a healthcare segment would be pro with technology. Their main concern is care of the patient rather than use of systems. Also, there would be limited resources that have the technology expertise in a healthcare industry and find it hard to learn.

• Vendors inability to convince and deliver - With many players in the market it is confusing for the provider to select the right EMR that suits its practice, be it based on technology, pricing, features, certifications, clientele, etc. It is not easy for the vendors to assist in such a decision unless they have familiar and clear with the client requirements and specific practice requirements.

• Absence of standardized data records - With various providers handling different ways and process to document their records, it is essential to have easy interoperability to interface with any new technology.

• Absenteeism of clinicians due to time constraints - From a healthcare provider’s point of view, they are required to directly deal with their patients and lack time to learn new technologies. This proves to be one of the vital reasons for not adopting Health IT.

The findings further shows that there is immense need for training and communication to get everyone on board in the effective adoption of health IT. This would eventually take its due course of action in order to incorporate technology and transform towards automation.

PACS has a growing market that lets many providers to penetrate. Understanding the specific needs of the hospitals, imaging centers and tele-radiology centers, Binary Spectrum’s PACS solution was designed to assist in improving their clinical workflow.

The solution comprises of image viewing and processing capabilities and reads standard DICOM medical images for modalities like CT, US, MR, XA, etc.  The following are the main features that Binary Spectrum PACS has come up with:
·          DICOM Workstation
·          Preset WL Values for various Modalities
·          User defined Graph Color, Ref Line Color etc. 
·          Communication for transferring the images from local system to remote systems.
·          2D-Process
·          3D-Process
·          Zoom, Contrast Adjustments and PAN.
·          CD-Burning with inbuilt viewer
·          DICOM save of processed Image.
·          Image Contrasting and Fusing
·          Measurement tools for Distance, Poly Line, Area, Point and Curve.
·          Report Setup for selecting .txt file, Report tool for displaying the report.

Other features like rotate, flip, MIP tools, single series tools, print, sms, image cut etc too are well incorporated. Multi series options are available for synchronization. Extraction of high intensity structure from the basic anatomy too can be done.
The system is designed with the main focus on imaging centers and tele-radiology practices as its target market. Besides, it helps supplement their current viewing solution with better performance and affordable price. With striking features like 3D, MIP, Measurements, Image contrasting and fusing, Binary Spectrum’s PACS solution helps offer a complete package of web based image processing.

What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud Computing is an electronic based computing process that helps you avoid dealing with complex practices. You might have big ideas that streamline your business and drive sales through roof. But to get there you would write business apps, and these business apps have always been too expensive. Consider the scenario below:  

Behind each app is the world of complexity involved. They require a Data Center with office space, power, cooling, bandwidth, network servers and storage. Along with this, a complicated Software stack like Crystal Reports, OBLIX 7.00, TIBCO 7.2.1, ORACLE 11.1, WEBLOGIC , JDK 6 , Windows VistaSP2, etc, is needed and to add  on, a team of experts to maintain them. Also, there is a necessity for Development, Testing, Staging, Production and Failure Environment.  Phew! When there encounters a problem then, ‘Oh Good Luck’, you call the technical support. What if they don’t know how to resolve? They then blame someone else.  Upgrading to new versions would degrade the whole system. This is the situation for a single app but when you multiply these headaches across hundreds or thousands of apps, it’s easy to see what the biggest company with best IT Departments aren’t getting the apps they need. Small Business doesn’t even have a chance to survive.

Now, here is where the Cloud computing concept comes into picture. With Gmail,

Do you require servers and storage? No.  

Do you require a technical team to keep it up and running? No.  

Do you have to do any upgrades? No.  

With Cloud computing, the setup running your apps runs on a shared data center. You just need to plug-in. This makes it faster to get started and cost less. When you use any app that runs in a cloud, you just need to login, customize it and start executing. That’s the power of cloud computing!

Cloud computing for a layman  

Let me give another great example for Cloud Computing. To generate electricity via turbines, magnets, batteries, transformers and fossil fuels, there is a cloud named “Electricity Company” that takes care of all these and supplies it to your home. All you need to do is just plug-in. Now, let’s apply the same logic on computers. Here in the cloud, you have computer stuffs that you don’t like to deal with such as servers, storage, office space, power, cooling etc. But you can access the power of these things by simply plugging into the cloud using the internet and it would bill you based on the usage by pooling in the resources together.  

Cloud computing - Business perspective  

These days, businesses run all kinds of apps such as CRM, HR, Accounting and custom built ones. With custom build apps, you can be up and running in few days which is totally unheard of for traditionally built software. They are based on an architecture called “Multi-Tenancy”.

With a Multi-Tenant app, you avoid duplication of each app and access only one app that everyone shares. Now, this is flexible enough for everyone to customize based on their specific needs. So when your app runs on a cloud you don’t buy anything. You don’t need to pay for personnel, product, facilities and it turns out to be more scalable, secure and reliable than the majority of apps out there. Let someone else invest in the infrastructure so you can focus on your key business applications. It’s all rolled out in your predictable monthly subscription. In addition, you pay based on usage alone. Finally cloud app is a simple model that has a huge impact on your bottom line!

( The author, Tauseef.M, is a Software Engineer for Binary Spectrum).

“In this world, there are some known things and some unknown things, and in between are the doors of perception “and I am here to set right your perception for SilverLight.

Microsoft has the best development IDE on the market. If you are a .NET/Microsoft developer, you already have the majority of the skills necessary to start developing in SilverLight!!

What is Silverlight?

Windows users won’t really care whether the highly rich web applications that they are viewing is using SilverLight or Flash . Both technologies require a small plug-in to be installed and once done, both are invisible until the user navigates a page that require their services. But we as developers need to care about which technology to choose. We need our applications to run on as many platforms as possible, and SilverLight applications will run on many browsers such as IE and Firefox on Windows, and Safari, Opera on the Mac.

OK lets not divert from the topic, let me technically provide SilverLight defination. “ SilverLight is a new cross-browser, cross-platform implementation of the .NET Framework for building and delivering the next generation of media experiences and Rich Interactive Applications (RIA) for the web.”

SilverLight doesn't require ASP.NET to be used on the backend web-server , it means you can use SilverLight with PHP on Linux if u wish to.   Thus the saying goes “Microsoft rebooted the Web “.

How the name Silver Light?

Below are the top ten names that got rejected before the name SilverLight came up:-

1.       Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation Live Rich Client ActiveX Player R2 Ultimate Edition Service Pack 1 CTP (WPFLRCAPR2UESP1CTP).

2.       Redlight.

3.       Microsoft 2.0

4.       Microsoft Light New User Experience.

5.       MicroMedia Player.

6.       Windows Technology Foundation.

7.       Non-Windows Presentation Foundation.

8.       David.

9.       AJAX - Asynchronous JavaScript and XAML.

10.   GrayLuminosity.

A sample SilverLight Application??

 Here we are going to create a simple SilverLight Application.

Steps to be followed:

1.       Open Visual Studio and select the File->New project .

2.       The below window gets displayed.

3.       After selecting the SilverLight Application, enter name and location as below and click OK.

4.       A Pop -Up as below gets displayed as below.

5.       You need a webpage to host the SilverLight components that you develop. Visual Studio makes this job easier just by prompting you to automatically create a website. Choose the options as shown in the attachment below.

6.       Thus when you create a new SilverLight Application using Visual Studio 2008, it creates loads of files by default as seen below.

Let’s detail out each of these files

·         App.xaml:

It is used to declare element which are available through-out the application. You can also declare Global variables just same as in Global.asax in Asp.net.

·         App.xaml.cs:

A code-behind file for the App.xaml file.

·         MainPage.xaml:

o   This is the page where all the UI elements that you require needs to be added. All UI elements in a .xaml control must be placed within a layout panel.

·         ClientBin folder is used to place the .xap file of SilverLight application. You can keep this anywhere in your web application but this is the default that is used by the SilverLight.

·         SilverLight.js is a helper file which enables Web sites to create advanced SilverLight installation and instantiation experiences.

·         SilverLightApplicationTestPage.aspx is the web page that will be displayed once the SilverLight application is built error-free and executed.

When you compile your Silver light Application project, it will compile all .xaml files and various other resources in to a single assembly file with the extension .xap and will have the same file name as your project name.

What is XAP?

XAP (pronounced as ZAP) is the file extension for a SilverLight-based application Package (.xap). This file contains the compressed assemblies and resources of a SilverLight 2.0 application. This .xap file contains the XAML and code from your .xaml files and will be executed by the SilverLight plugin installed.

One nice thing about Visual studio is, it will show you a preview of the page as you type the xaml tags. When you complete typing the above xaml tags in your .xaml page, you will see the design preview in Visual Studio as shown below:

Thus you have created your first Silver Light application.  You can also zoom the Rectangle box above to 100%. Now just built the application and run it. You are done!

 (The author, Tauseef.M is a Software Engineer in Binary Spectrum).

Installing Java 1.6 on Linux--Using WINSCP involves the following steps:

Step-1

Installing Java:

·         Download jdk version--1.6x for Linux from Sun website

·         Download the non-rpm version.

·         Use WINSCP and connect to the server.

·         Go to usr dir

·         Right click and create a new directory--java

·         Give all the read/write permission to the directory

·         Move the download jdk from your local system to the java directory

Open putty connection to the server

#cd usr

Execute the command using putty:./jre-1.bin

/* optional

# mkdir -p /usr/local/java

# cd /usr/local/java

# mv /path/to/jdk-1_6_0_20-linux-x64.bin

# chmod u+x jdk-1_6_0_20-linux-x64.bin

# ./jdk-1_6_0_20-linux-x64.bin

*/

Step-2

·         Set JAVA_HOME and PATH

·         Set JAVA_HOME to the dir of java

·         PATH to bin dir of JAVA_HOME

·         Use--Putty to execute the below

·         # export JAVA_HOME=/usr/java/jdk1.6.0_10

·         # export PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$PATH

Check if we have installed it:

# which java

/usr/java/jdk1.6.0_10/bin/java

# java -version

java version "1.6.0_10"

Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_10-b33)

Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 11.0-b15, mixed mode)

Installing Tomcat 6.0 on Linux--Using WINSCP involves the following steps:

Step-1

Download tomcat -- Binary Core Distribution file --6.x to you local machine

·         Rename the file as tomcat 6

·         Use WINSCP and move to server /var/lib folder

·         Create a new folder name as--tomcat6

·         Give read write access permission to the folder

·         Right click on the tomcat6.tar.gz and say extract

·         In the dialogue box give tomcat 6

Step-2

Set CATALINA_HOME AND CATALINA_BASE

·         # export JAVA_HOME=/usr/java/jdk1.6.0_20

·         # export PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$PATH

·         # export CATALINA_HOME=/var/lib/tomcat6

·         # export CATALINA_BASE=/var/lib/tomcat6

·         # export JRE_HOME=/usr/java/jdk1.6.0_20

Step-3

Create a manager role with user name and password to deploy the application

·         Use WINSCP to navigate to the folder-var/lib/tomcat6/conf

·         Open tomcat-users.xml

·         Copy that file to local machine and give the access.

start tomcat: #cd CATALINA_HOME/bin

#./startup.sh

shutdown tomcat:#cd CATALINA_HOME/bin

#./shutdown.sh

Test: www.myserver.com:8080/ 

The above url should give a tomcat default page.

www.myserver.com:8080/manager/html should prompt for a user name and password.

(The author, Anjana, is a  Software Engineer at Binary Spectrum)

We can create an ongoing task in MS Project by creating a “Hammock Task”. Hammock task duration changes automatically when the project finish date is changed.

Steps for creating a Hammock Task:
1.     Click on Project start date cell, the start date cell will be highlighted.
2.     On the edit menu, click copy (cell)
3.     Click on the ‘ongoing task’ start date, the start date cell will be highlighted.
4.     On edit menu, click ‘Paste Special’ and click ‘Paste Link’.
5.     Click on Project end date cell, the end date cell will be highlighted.
6.     On the edit menu, click copy (cell)
7.     Click on the ‘ongoing task’ end date, the end date cell will be highlighted.
8.     On edit menu, click ‘Paste Special’ and click ‘Paste Link’.

I had to upload pin codes in excel to database. After procrastinating on net for considerable time, I decided to find a quick solution... :) Though I am aware of available excel api’s, I dint want to spend time in reading api docs for breaking a thin twig. This method can be followed if you want to export a single column from excel to a table.  

The interest of developer will always be towards learning new technologies. It’s secondary that whether in real-time you are going to use it in or not. One of the most popular and fastest growing technologies that I came across is Ruby on Rails (RoR).

Ruby on Rails was developed by David Heinemeier Hansson from his work on BaseCamp; a project management tool, which offers to-do lists, wiki-style web-based text documents, milestone management, file sharing, time tracking, and a messaging system.

Like many web frameworks, Rails uses the Model View Controller (MVC) architecture to organize applications.

• Each and Everything is Object: Even numbers in ruby are treated as object. Looking at the example, what output you can expect from this?

8.times {print “Guess what”} its prints Guess what 8 times.

• Powerful blocks: Code blocks can be passed as parameter to method. Following example prints out all the elements in an array

  jArray.each{|element| print element}

• Return is optional in Methods: In ruby return statement is optional in methods. The value of the last expression becomes the return value of that method. For example: 

  def testReturn n = 2 * 3 en

• Parallel Assignment in Ruby: We can change the multiple variables in one assignment statement. Swapping of two variables is the good example for it.   n1 = 1

  n2 = 3

   n1, n2 = n2,n1

• Everything in Ruby is open: Including the built-in classes, in ruby, additional methods can be added to the classes even at run-time also. For example: FixNum is the build in Data Type for all to which I added the method called old.                         

class Fixnum

def old return self-1

end

end

8.old  # prints 7

(The author, Jagadish.M, is a Software Engineer at Binary Spectrum).

We often see programmers jump to their seats and start coding as soon as they just hear any requirement. They may be able to complete the task, but may actually be lost in fixing the logical errors for a long time.

I have followed this approach that I am stating below, and yes, it worked well. I also believe that this is a stress free approach towards developing and implementing the requirement.

This is just doing object modeling in a well planned way. This surely can be achieved with UML tools. But paper work at times does prove to be quicker.

Let me know your thoughts on it and looking forward to know your development approaches as well.

Here are the 10 steps for a planned approach:

Step-1: Get requirement

Step-2: Don’t start development as soon as you get the requirement

Step-3: Lets follow the divide and rule approach - Divide the requirement into subtasks! We may have a list of subtasks

Step-4: Rule Them -Recognize the dependent task

Step-5: Create a class with requirement's name

Step-6: Make the subtasks as methods in the class

Step-7: Recognize the Inputs and Outputs for each method

Step-8: Build the DBQUERY

Step-9: Include the logic

Step-10: Unit test with SOP for each method in the class.

(The author, Anjana.M, is a Software Engineer at Binary Spectrum) 

As the saying goes, “Necessity is the mother of invention. It is true, but its father is creativity, and knowledge is the midwife"; Well guy's I am very happy to share my knowledge too regarding stored Procedures. For now, I have decided to write a preliminary description on Stored Procedure in SQL Server 2005.

Starting with what are stored Procedures?

In simple terms "Stored Procedures are a set of already written SQL statements that are saved in the database." If you are executing the same query over and over again, then it would make sense to simply put it into stored procedure.

Furthermore, with a stored procedure, you can store all the logic in the database, and use a simple command to call the stored procedure. Later, if you decide to migrate from ASP to java, J2EE, you only need to change the application layer as much of the business logic will remain in the database.

Getting Started with Stored Procedures

  Basic requirements to begin writing stored procedures:

  1. A database Management System (Ex: Sql Server 2005)

  2. A database built inside the database Management System.(Ex : Demo database)

  3. A Query Analyzer which is Built-in into Sql server 2005. You need not worry!!

So let's begin our countdown, creativity all that matters!!

  1. Open Sql Server 2005

  2. Right click -> Create Database

  3. Enter new Database name (dsp_users)

The following examples facilitate in handling null values in MySQL query itself instead of handling them in jsp pages.
                 
    
Syntax:
               
Select IFNULL (exp1,exp2) , IFNULL (exp1,exp2) from tableName
                IFNULL return exp1 if it is not null
                Else
                If exp1 is null then returns exp2
      

          In Interface it looks like this:

 

Select IFNULL(Name,’ Not Available ’),IFNULL(Address,’Not Available  ’),IFNULL(emailed,’Not Available’) from tableName

           Result:

 

 

 

           In Interface it looks like this:

 

    Example 2:

          Select IFNULL(Name,’  ’),IFNULL(Address,’  ’),IFNULL(emailed,’  ’) from tableName

          Result:

 

         In Interface it looks like this:

 

 

(The author, Jagadish.M, is a Software Engineer at Binary Spectrum).

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Do you think XML is the only fastest way for serializing the structured data?
Then go ahead and read this. I am sure you will have a different opinion at the end of this discussion.