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ebXML demonstrated on epidemic alerts and responses
14 December 2003 -- With the U.S. in the grip of a rapidly-spreading influenza outbreak, six technology vendors demonstrated how ebXML technology can help provide early-warning epidemic alerts and improve the response of health care providers to the emergency. The simulation, held on 10 December 2003 at IDEAlliance's XML 2003 conference, also showed in action OASIS's Universal Business Language (UBL), and eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML).
The demo covered three phases in the business process:
- Early detection
- Epidemic alert broadcasts
- Rapid reaction by health care providers
In the early detection phase medical labs, hospital emergency rooms, and airports capture the first reports of disease outbreaks, using XML-enabled electronic morbidity reports, based on Adobe's Portable Document Format. The simulation included airports, since airports reported many of the first cases of the the deadly SARS virus earlier this year.
In the demonstration, the early detectors submitted their morbidity data via SOAP messages to an ebXML registry residing at a national public health agency patterned after the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta. Farrukh Najmi of Sun Microsystems who led the session, said that morbidity forms are now sent to CDC in hard copy and fax. CDC recently began using ebXML technology for its Public Health Information Network.
The public health agency's registry, based on the open-source freebXML registry product, used role-based access control policies meeting the XACML standard. In the simulation, and in real life, XACML provides semantics for processing policies and determining their applicability to access requests.
The public health agency, upon collecting and analyzing these early-warning reports, determines that an epidemic has broken out, and alerts its network of health care providers, as well as state and local public health agencies. In the demo, one of the health care providers, the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota (which contributed industry expertise to the simulation), also has an ebXML registry to help manage the response.
The Mayo Clinic's registry connects to a Business Process Specification Schema (BPSS) engine that generates the message choreographies for ordering supplies to respond to the epidemic. In the simulation, the BPSS engine generated purchase orders for fiber masks and disinfectant gel, using UBL purchase order formats. The suppliers responded with UBL purchase order responses. The demo also used ebXML Collaboration Protocol Agreements (CPAs) to determine run-time configurations for message exchanges between the clinic and its suppliers.
Orders and order responses used the ebXML Messaging Service (ebMS), which is based on SOAP with Attachments and supports both security and reliable messaging. The reliable messaging in ebMS provides acknowledgments for individual messages, while a purchase order response reflects the supplier's business commitment to fulfill the goods or services requested in the order.
Vendors taking part in the simulation included Sun Microsystems, Adobe, Sybase, Iopsis, Cyclone Commerce, and Ponton Consulting, with each company taking a role in the interactions. Amberpoint also provided monitoring and management software for the demo, but these capabilities were not integrated into the simulation.
The presentation slides used in the demonstration are available for download in Powerpoint or OpenOffice formats.
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