IDIOM News
From Business Rules Journal
Preamble - a Real-world example.
Businesses everywhere grapple with the problems of meeting increasing competition and relentless demands for higher service standards with limited resources. There is a continuing challenge to build applications flexible enough to meet sudden changes in business conditions and business policies.
Power Solutions is an Australian software developer specialising in healthcare systems. Anyone providing solutions to the Australian health market must be able to support the WIES (Weighted Inlier Equivalent Separation) funding system - the rules set by health authorities (in Australia, the state governments) for the allocation of state funds in health. In the state of Victoria, two other funding systems, VACS and CRAFT, are also used for some health services, and each has its own set of rules.
Under the WIES system, the government pays hospitals an agreed amount for performing an agreed quantity and "mix" of medical procedures. In addition, it provides bulk funding of lab services, IV products and so on.
WIES and other state systems are complex enough in themselves, but each hospital then faces the added challenge of implementing its own rules to allocate the funds it receives, along with a percentage of staff and facilities costs, to individual patient episodes. All hospitals must understand and manage the total cost per patient, and the resulting surplus or loss. Throughout the year each hospital has to manage expenditure against its financial and service delivery targets, revising and reallocating as necessary. This is a delicate juggling act and demands sophisticated management systems.
Power Solutions is expanding into international markets and has already made a significant sale in the US. Southeast Asia is another likely market for its products because the Australian implementation of Diagnosis Related Groups (DRGs) is being adopted in Singapore and other territories in the region. Power Solutions decided that a rules management tool was required to codify and maintain the diversity of rules that occur in different health funding systems, not only across Australia but around the world.
Needing a tool that could define funding rules like WIES outside the application, allowing them to be easily changed every year, Power Solutions evaluated the IDIOM Decision Suite and selected it to underpin the new revenue module of Power Cost Manager. Customer roll-outs begin in early 2004. On the funding side, the WIES rules will be a "black box" of knowledge within the hospital’s Power Cost Manager application, with a new version of the rules supplied by Power Solutions each year. On the revenue allocation side, the hospitals have the choice of using IDIOM to set up their allocation rules themselves, or commissioning Power Solutions to do that for them. Either way, they will have a comprehensive set of rules that are easily modified as the funding balancing act requires.
The rules creation and rules maintenance features of the IDIOM Decision Suite enable the hospital’s non-technical staff to create and manage rules for these complex funding and resource allocation requirements. The hospital’s allocation rules, which can change at any time, are managed in a timely manner so that new rules are available when needed - and correct. The ability for different organisations or groups to share responsibilities for rules management is an important feature of IDIOM, particularly for Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) who build systems that are deployed into many different organisations. In the health funding context, it has proven to be an effective procedure for rules to be built by Power Solutions and ownership of the rules delegated to the hospital for ongoing changes and additions.
The IDIOM Approach
IDIOM is concerned with business rules for business people. This fundamental axiom underpins both the runtime architecture and the user's view of the tool suite. We expect many different parties to participate in the broader rules management process. In particular we believe that rules must be owned and managed by the individuals who are as close to the ‘source of truth’ as possible - that is, by business people. Technologists need not participate in the process of defining rules, though they are involved in their deployment.
IDIOM separates the management of rules and business knowledge from the technical issues involved in application development, thereby removing some of the organisational obstacles to knowledge management. This clarifies and simplifies the system architecture with benefits on both sides. On the rules side the organisation is free to manage knowledge either by developing its own rules repository or by assigning this responsibility to its solution provider or rules vendor. On the technical side, components are freed of business-specific content, making them more reusable. A more collaborative style of application development evolves which enables multiple organisations with different strengths and capabilities to contribute their business and technology know-how.
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