Cerner enables Medical Insights with RCP “The maturity

of the Eclipse application

edical imaging is framework was insight for patient treatment. M central to modern Imaging is so pervasive that health care. From broken the icing on the a large medical facility can bones to cancer, stroke and cake. It really generate roughly 30 million a wide range of diseases individual images that must and injuries, technologies allowed us to be made securely available to such as x-rays, CT teams of diagnosticians, scanning, and MRIs give focus on indexed, archived and medical practitioners available for easy retrieval invaluable, non-invasive innovation.” within well organized workflows. The IT infrastructure to meet these life-and-death requirements has to guarantee extremely robust and reliable delivery and display of images that often exceed a gigabyte in size. Since 1979, Cerner Corporation of Kansas City has been a leading provider of information and business management systems for the health care sector. In 2001 they launched a system to meet the dual challenges of picture archiving and communications (PACS) and radiology information systems (RIS). A new Face on Imaging While this legacy system met the stringent requirements of the Food and Drug Administration, and was well received in the market, it was not a long-term solution. Cerner had licensed Radiologists must manipulate very large images with distributed viewing capabilities ProVision to make diagnosis. Eclipse’s hardware access made this feasible. from a third party, and, as Nathan Beyer, In addition to fitting within this architecture, Senior Software Architect explains, “The Cerner had several other requirement. The complexity of the integration made it tool had to meet tough FDA standards for challenging to develop and limited future medical devices. The software also has to directions. It also had the look of two distinct provide a native OS look and feel; at first on applications.” Windows and but also on any other platforms in the future. By 2005 Cerner had decided to redesign and replace the desktop portion of their product Cerner looked at a variety of options, with a seamless solution that would serve including AWT/, web-based rich their customers’ needs for years to come. internet application (RIA) using AJAX, HTML and a , and Eclipse RCP. Making High Stakes Choices Eclipse clearly came out ahead. As David Like its predecessor, the replacement, called Duello, Engineering Director, explains, ProVision and released late in 2007, is part “Only RCP really gave us everything we of a flexible - architecture with were looking for, including the native look of image archiving and database storage of Windows and the ability to launch ProVision associated data on the back-end. Clients via , but the maturity of the

RCP gave Cerner the consistent and familiar Windows look-and-feel customers expected. The low contrast blue-on-blue interface is optimized for dimly lit diagnostics rooms. communicate securely via HTTPS, allowing Eclipse application framework was the icing diagnosticians to view and work with on the cake. It really allowed us to focus on imagery and other patient information from innovation.” distributed workstations. These specialized workstations are often customized with A case in point - radiologists often need to multiple high-resolution monitors for fine-tune image characteristics to better viewing images in addition to a conventional interpret subtle details, so access to graphics monitor for application interaction. hardware was critical for acceptable performance. RCP gave Cerner’s developers

2 the access they needed to develop this Being a large project with over 16 Java critical feature while easing development of developers on two continents, there were the common functionality a modern come challenges becoming fully productive application requires. developing ProVision with Eclipse. It required a significant investment of time and Building Blocks for Success energy for the team to start building an RCP Cerner took advantage Eclipse RCP’s application from scratch. But the wide implementation of the OSGi platform to variety of information available, from quick manage ProVision as a collection of OSGi tutorials, screencasts and other online bundles, manageable units of functionality resources such as the IBM Developer Works deployed in JAR files. “We currently deploy site, to articles and full length books, gave about a dozen bundles.” relates Beyer, “As Cerner a rich pool of knowledge and we continue to work with Eclipse there will experience to dip into. be more.” Cerner has exceeded their development goals In addition to the management advantages for ProVision. The Eclipse Rich Client provided by bundles, Cerner leveraged the Platform allowed them to focus on meeting Eclipse plug-in architecture, both to take business needs rather than spending time advantage of existing third-party developing underlying functionality. Cerner functionality, such as the Subversion plug-in already has several other Eclipse-based used during development, and to encapsulate projects on the go, and expect to see even and maintain clean boundaries between greater efficiencies in the future as they various parts of the application. In the leverage an expanding library of plug-ins future, they plan to use plug-ins to facilitate across projects. Future plans include targeted updates. expanded use of OSGi bundles, BIRT, the When they ran into problems supporting Business Intelligence Reporting Tools, TPTP multiple developers and testers needing to for testing. build and test the application simultaneously, With Eclipse in hand, the prognosis is the Eclipse plug-in mechanism, allowed excellent for Cerner’s solutions. them to integrate with an already familiar Maven 2 build system to achieve consistent and repeatable builds while providing Ron Stone is a technology writer and flexibility for multiple users. content management consultant based in Ottawa, Canada. SWT, the Standard Widget Toolkit, gave them the native look and feel and performance of a Windows application, October, 2007 while JFace provided useful and time-saving abstraction for GUI development.

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