09/03/2003

MITEM Corporation, a developer of integration software and business applications, says it’s developing “robust, real-time applications with Macromedia Flash MX Professional. MITEM's developers have taken full advantage of Flash technology to create a rich, Web-based application for the healthcare market.”

This application, called Blue Iris, “enhances, extends and integrates existing hospital information systems. Blue Iris pulls critical patient data such as lab results, medications, images and dictated voice recordings from backend systems and delivers them directly to the desktop or to any mobile computing device. Blue Iris presents all of this critical data in a single-view, Web-based application that mirrors the natural workflow of clinicians,” MITEM asserts.

“In our product plan we set some very important workflow criteria and user interface standards for Blue Iris. It was critical that the Blue Iris user interface (UI) compliment the natural workflow of clinicians in a hospital environment. If we missed this mark, the application would never gain acceptance. It was immediately apparent that an HTML approach could not deliver the rich user experience or the workflow features we required. In addition, Blue Iris had to be accessible from many different device types and from remote locations; only Flash met all of these requirements," commented Andy Nelson, director of products for MITEM.

Performance was also an important issue since Blue Iris integrates data from multiple back-end systems. MITEM says, “The Flash UI allows a clinician to begin interacting with the system while data is still being retrieved from various hospital information system modules (e.g. laboratory, pharmacy, radiology, patient accounting) and other systems such as medical imaging. With a traditional HTML interface, the user would have to wait for the entire process of retrieving, updating and rendering of all data to be completed before any interaction could begin.”

"Blue Iris represents a pioneering use of Macromedia Flash to a build a true enterprise-class application," said Lucian Beebe, senior product manager, Macromedia. "We think the rich user experience MITEM has created using Flash MX will influence an entirely new segment of developers to choose this method for building mission-critical applications."

Nelson added, "We are extremely pleased to see the addition of features like forms-based programming to the development environment in Flash MX Professional 2004. This feature alone will create greater efficiencies in the development process as we begin to build new end-to-end, integrated applications for our other key vertical markets."

"Macromedia has begun to increase its addressable market with a stream of new products and enabling technologies. Blue Iris demonstrates how Macromedia's latest technology stack can be used to develop a new class of main-stream, Web-based commercial applications," commented Ed Bierdeman, a top-rated financial analyst on Macromedia and senior vice president for Moors & Cabot, Inc.