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Architecture Briefs

Each of the briefs in this section covers an aspect of Tolven. These briefs should help you gain a better understanding of how Tolven works from both a technical and functional (clinical) perspective. The audience type is suggested for each brief in the summaries below:

Data Flow - General Audience

The dataflow brief is a high-level view of the primary data flows and shows where data comes to rest. This brief should help explain how Tolven exploits Healthcare informatics standards like HL7 RIM and ASTM's CCR while at the same time providing high-performance abstractions for operational use.

Components - General Audience

The components brief describes each of system components used in a typical Tolven installation. It also covers some of the interchange formats and technologies used between components.

Invitations [TBD] - General Audience

The invitation brief describes the mechanisms for inter-account commmunication and end-user notification.

Clinical Data Definitions - General Audience, Clinical Audience

The content of documents stored in the Tolven platform are normalized using the definitions developed and published on the WikiHIT public forum (www.wikihit.org).  Community participation in WikiHIT contributes to the delivery of open source interoperable healthcare information solutions to the global marketplace. 

Metadata - General Audience, Functional Audience

This paper describes the Tolven metadata mechanism and therefore how significant aspects of Tolven applications are configured. Includes details of AccountType, MenuStructure, CSS, and other application-specific configuration is affected.

Widgets - General Audience, Technical Audience

This paper describes the browser-based widgets used by Tolven wizards and drilldown forms.

Templates - Technical Audience

This paper describes the mechanism underlying Clinical Data Defintions. Called "Templated RIM" (TRIM), the mechanism provides fine-grained representation of atomic and composite clinical elements (blood pressure, vital signs, assessments, etc). This paper assumes the reader has at least a passing understanding of HL7 V3 and the Reference Information Model (RIM).

Web Security - Technical Audience

This paper describes mechanisms that Tolven uses to mitigate security risks in the web applications. It is presented as a point-by-point review of the OWASP top-10 security vulnerabilities for Java Enterprise Applications.

Encryption - Technical Audience

A review of encryption of documents at rest in Tolven with some high-level coverage of cryptography. Contrast with SSL which covers encryption of information in transit between system components. Document encryption is just one of the levels of security provided by Tolven. Also covers document signing.

Rules - General Audience, Clinical Audience

The rules brief covers more details about the Tolven rules component. Rules operate in the context of an account and usually a specific user and/or patient to react to a new document (message) being added to the database.

UML Models - Technical Audience

Key Tolven entities and processes are rendered as UML diagrams.

SSL - General Audience

The Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) brief covers the very important ability to securely communicate between system components. In Tolven, system components require mutual authentication. Communication between components is encrypted, even when the components are running on the same host.

Java 5 - Technical Audience

Since Tolven exploits the newer features of Java, this brief covers some of the more significant features of the Java 5 language. Links are provided to examples in the Tolven source code.

EJB3 - Technical Audience

Tolven's enterprise-class architecture depends on the new and dramatically improved Enterprise Java Beans version 3 (EJB3) specification. The EJB3 architecture supports local calls for best performance, remote RMI/IIOP calls, JMS, .NET, and Web-services topologies. EJB3 persistence provides database independence while at the same time integrating with Java security and transaction architectures.

The extensive tutorial in this brief covers many of the features of EJB3 persistence using a very simple business model. Links at the bottom of the tutorial provide access to the source code.