Arch-rivals Apple, Google and Samsung (as well as other familiar Silicon Valley names) are offering glitzy front-end mobile platforms and applications that promise to seamlessly bring together data from multiple sources into a single interface.
The real unsung heros in mobile healthcare, however, are the middleware vendors who allow those front-ends to pull data out of gnarly back-end enterprise systems.
It goes without saying, then, that choosing the right middleware is critical.
When it comes time to make a decision, there are essentially two routes an organization can take: choosing from time-tested giants like Microsoft, Oracle and SAP, or opting for a relatively new cloud-based company like Catavolt, Kidozen and Kony.
Here's a closer look at those three cloud-based alternatives.
Catavolt
While Apple and Samsung partner with Catavolt on the front end, it's Catavolt's middleware software and healthcare platform that does the hard work of accessing that back-end data.
Although Catavolt can be described as a cloud-based service, it goes beyond simple cloud hosting, and becomes what CEO George Mashini described as “a shield over enterprise data.”
The cloud talks to the data in a generic form and then presents it on a mobile device. Although Catavolt is basically a tool for building mobile business process applicatons, it also offers pre-built healthcare templates.
Mashini said a very large insurance company (as yet unidentified) is about to sign off on a solution that will allow payers to access "sensitive" data on a mobile device.
With Catavolt's solution, the data is neither on the mobile nor in the cloud, so to speak; rather, it will remain behind the customer’s in-house firewall. Which means a physician sitting in Starbucks and accessing your network is still secure
Kidozen
Kidozen has what CEO Jesus Rodriguez calls a "cloud friendly" architecture. What he means by that is that while Kidozen can deploy completely in the cloud, it can also become a hybrid cloud solution subject to an organization's specific domain policies.
As far as connectors to that all-important back-end legacy software, Kidozen offers 80 APIs and 50 connectors to ERP systems from the likes of Netsuite, Oracle and others. The solution does more than just connect to an iPad or Android device, however; it also offers business analytics to understand how staff and consumers are actually using data.
For the most part, organizations can use any mobile software development kit to create front-end applications.
Rodriguez said HP soon will announce that it now supports Kidozen as part of its platform.
