</P Allegiance Healthcare Solutions actually provided integration development and data conversion services in a project of migrating Christus Health Systems from Cloverleaf to IBM Integration Bus Healthcare IT organizations rely on information systems from many different vendors to support activities related to patient care, because no single system can do it all. In today’s healthcare environment, however, keeping each system’s data in a separate silo is not feasible, because data needs to move freely among the various systems to match the complex workflows of modern healthcare systems. Interoperability is not optional. PROBLEM Most healthcare IT software vendors are not in business primarily to interoperate with other software; they have developed unique intellectual property around specific aspects of healthcare and have implemented it in their software. Consequently, vendors often prefer to focus on the clinical and business functionality at the core of their product, and features related to data interchange are added as an afterthought. Unfortunately, failing to treat interoperability as an important, first-tier feature can result in expensive problems down the road for these vendors. Home-built integration components are seldom easy to configure, which leads to unnecessarily lengthy implementation times, or, even worse, an inflexible interface specification that requires the customer to handle customizations on their end. Monitoring can present similar difficulties; troubleshooting often amounts to reading through cryptic log files, which is an unwelcome chore for the vendor’s operational team. Furthermore, vendors assuming the responsibility for their own interoperability means, they must take on the burden of fully implementing existing interchange specifications and keeping ahead of emerging standards. Implementing an interoperability solution is a much bigger commitment than it initially seems, and vendors that choose this path are often surprised by the overall cost. With pressure on your business growing every day – to satisfy the changing requirements of current customers, to ward off threats from competitors, and to win new customers – Rhapsody will help you raise your business to higher levels by delivering innovative solutions faster. Rhapsody’s technical and business benefits include:

*  The ability to address the needs of new users and markets without changing application code or creating customer-specific interfaces. * Higher customer satisfaction through rapid tailoring of applications using business process definitions, rules, and workflows for specific markets or customers *  Faster implementations *  The ability to compete successfully in the service-oriented world with automatic service-enablement of application functionality *  Ease of management *  Higher return on development investment With your Rhapsody enriched applications, you will gain a strategic position in customer organizations by owning and orchestrating key business processes.   And your customers will gain: *  IT flexibility with support for multiple infrastructure technologies *  The ability to rapidly incorporate your applications into multiple business processes *  Lower total cost-of-ownership as the time and effort required for application integration is dramatically reduced *  Greater insight into business processes through Rhapsody’s Active Analytics monitoring and business intelligence capabilities *  Easier access to applications through Rhapsody-enabled browser interfaces *  Innovation develop and deploy a Software as a Service offering that rapidly automates any-to-any communication of business data. Contact Us for more information about how Rhapsody can help your organization cost-effectively improve its interoperability strategy.