Automating peer review may do much more

Acesis has a solution for automating peer review, the process by which doctors look at past cases to see what went wrong and how to improve things. It is not a simple thing. "You really have to address clinical data capture," founder and CEO Kevin Chesney (right) told me. The result is called the Acesis Notes Engine. "We have a general medical template with a vast terminology." Data can be pulled out, structured, and shared. It's important to note that this is a process which, because of the need for security, and the lack of data format standards, has not been computerized before. Getting it into templates makes many important things possible, Chesney said.  "Some of what we showed, keynoting at Adobe's Engage, was integration with video and audio so you can share peer reviews and leverage that as a service.

"If you architect appropriately you can leverage best of breed, and support well-known APIs to integrate seamlessly. The idea is to address clear business problems. Vendors have not done enough to deliver workable solutions in this space, it requires new ways of thinking."

Among the new ways adopted by Acesis were open source technologies, including Adobe Flex, the Spring Java framework, and SQL databases, all tied together with XML.

Chesney, it turns out, has extensive XML experience.  "XML allows for these extensible capabilities," he said. "I've been involved in many standards. I wrote a CORBA standard. With mortgages I worked with MISMO."

The implications of this work are enormous and I hope to discuss them more here. For now it's vital to know that Acesis has automated an important process that had never been automated before, and done it with open source tools.