Harris Corporation Delivers CONNECT 2.4; Built Under Contract With the Federal Health Architecture

WASHINGTON, April 8 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Harris Corporation (NYSE: HRS), an international communications and information technology company, has released the newest version of CONNECT software to enable healthcare organizations to securely exchange patient information on the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN). CONNECT 2.4 offers key feature enhancements to the open-source enterprise framework, compliance with updated NHIN specifications, security improvements and progress toward development platform neutrality.

The CONNECT solution was developed under contract for the Federal Health Architecture (FHA) project within the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.  The CONNECT solution was featured in the Interoperability Showcase at the recent Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society conference in Atlanta, Georgia.

The open-source CONNECT is being widely embraced as a health information exchange solution for NHIN connectivity, with many health enterprises abandoning proprietary solutions and opting instead for the CONNECT open-source platform.  

"For the seventh consecutive time, Harris has delivered the CONNECT release on schedule and on budget, with full functionality," said Jim Traficant, vice president of Harris Healthcare Solutions.  "The CONNECT solution is improving healthcare quality, lowering costs and accelerating access to care and benefits by integrating health information across federal agencies and between federal agencies and the private sector."

Additional benefits of CONNECT 2.4 include:

• Certificate revocation to ensure validity of participants.
• Universal client interface for patient discovery, which allows users to search for a particular patient.
• Decreased memory consumption, improving performance when the CONNECT gateway runs.
• Decreased compilation times, which improves performance when participants create their implementations of the CONNECT gateway.

The Social Security Administration was the first federal agency to go live with CONNECT in February 2009, receiving data from private sector provider MedVA.  More recently, the Department of Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs used CONNECT as the gateway to demonstrate the ability to exchange live data over the NHIN with their private sector partner, Kaiser-Permanente.

Harris — along with its teammates Agilex Technologies and Scenpro — continues to foster and support the CONNECT Open Source Community.  CONNECT 2.4 builds upon the progress already under way as part of CONNECT 2.3, including establishing platform independence through a software baseline that allows neutrality of Integrated Development Environments used by software developers.  This improvement will make it easier for users to leverage contributions from the open-source community.  The team also migrated to a new web portal that is easier to update and speeds response times, as well as supported a webinar for the release of CONNECT 2.3 and an outlook for CONNECT 2.4.

"Open-source CONNECT is key to accelerating the national priority of interoperable electronic health records and secure health information exchange," said Traficant.

The CONNECT solution is sponsored by the FHA project within Health and Human Services.  FHA received the 2009 Information Week's Government Innovator Award for the CONNECT solution and was recognized as one of "10 Government Organizations that Understand IT Innovation".

Harris Healthcare Solutions provides secure enterprise intelligence solutions and services for government and commercial customers — including systems integration, intelligent infrastructure, advanced visualization and display, enterprise digital content management and IT solutions.  A leader in federal healthcare IT integration, Harris products, systems and services improve healthcare outcomes by assuring that critical medical and benefits information is delivered with security and privacy to the right person, on the right device, at the point of care.

About Harris Corporation

Harris is an international communications and information technology company serving government and commercial markets worldwide.  Headquartered in Melbourne, Florida, the company has approximately $5 billion of annual revenue and more than 15,000 employees — including nearly 7,000 engineers and scientists.  Harris is dedicated to developing best-in-class assured communications® products, systems, and services.  Additional information about Harris Corporation is available at www.harris.com.

SOURCE Harris Corporation