LiveData is an interesting company who's cut their teeth in
manufacturing and power generation, transmission and generation
markets. As a participant in CIMIT's Operating Room of the Future,
LiveData has taken a step into health care. Providing what they call,
“Smart Integration,” LiveData provides the following capabilities:

  • Establish real-time, bi-directional data flows between any intelligent device, application and IT system
  • Monitor and respond in real-time to rapidly changing, complex combinations of operational and IT conditions
  • Visualize the current state of complex situations, through highly graphic, continuously updated, web-based dashboards
  • Synthesize all of the information relevant to a given situation, bridging the gap between real-time operations and IT
  • Archive real-time data with precise time synchronization, so that
    any operation or occurrence can be recreated and analyzed at any time
  • Easily understand and change rules for data flow, analysis and response.

They accomplish the above with the following product line:

  • RTI (I'm guessing “real time integration”) Server that collects, transforms, and delivers real-time data flows, from tens,
    thousands, or hundreds of thousands of points, to diverse systems and
    applications, to synthesize all of the relevant data for complex
    operations and enable rapid response.
  • LiveData Dashboard presents mission-critical data — via a highly visual, graphic user
    interface -to anyone authorized to view or manage
    an ongoing operation or process, who needs to know what is happening
    now.
  • LiveData Protocol Server captures, models and delivers datastreams across diverse source and
    destination protocols     and data structures, preserving all data
    attributes and providing exceptionally fine time resolution and
    synchronization. Protocols include
    HL7 and IEEE 1073 MIB (such as it is) and a bunch of industrial
    protocols that most of us in health care have never heard of.
  • LiveData Historian enables users to capture all of the data relevant to any given
    operation as that operation progresses through time. All data -
    measurements, video clips, graphics - can be archived, directed to
    other applications for analysis, or used to recreate and play back
    important events.

When LiveData says “real time” they mean less than one millisecond. The
hairy edge of health care systems integration is continuous monitoring
and life threatening alarms, certainly one of the most demanding real
time environments around. I'm not all that excited about the Patient Knowledge System that LiveData's created
for CIMIT's ORF because single vendor solutions can theoretically
deliver the same type of solution. Bigger challenges (and needs) lie
outside tightly focused and vendor dominated areas like the OR at the
point of care and across the enterprise. These kinds of applications go
way beyond interface engines, falling in the realm of workflow
automation and FDA oversight — a chimera-like beast; part information
system, part virtual medical device.