Applying the PHGrid Architecture to Existing PHIN Infrastructure: Reusing Investments

The Public Health Information Network (PHIN) has been evolving in response to emerging industry demand. Through its process of architecture and development, public health partners have been given a recommended deployment and best practices model such that all of the software developed and distributed by CDC can easily fit into existing and/or newly created infrastructures.

 The Public Health Grid (PHGrid) is an emerging architecture that extends PHIN. While its core components are reference implementation, these components are also deployed as production ready, hardened modules that will have to coexist with the already deployed PHIN software components, in order to leverage preexisting investments in systems and infrastructure that support existing PHIN technologies. 2009 envisions the release of PHGrid service containers that can host CDC and partner program services and communicate securely with partners. This architecture describes how public health is able to use PHGrid services within their existing technology environment as well as how to contribute their own services for use by CDC and partners.

 The PHGrid Architecture consists of three separate layers:

• Conceptual –interrelationship of applications, security, collaboration tools, and partner tools.
• Deployment –specific software components to be installed and configured as a “node”
• Service –domain and infrastructure services available for deployment within “nodes”

   

Harmonizing the existing PHIN infrastructure with PHGrid and National Health Information Network Gateway (NHIN) infrastructures will leverage existing public health investments while significantly reducing future invests. While a large part of this effort involves planning around Governance and Public Health Cross-Jurisdictional Collaboration, the physical architectural components for PHGrid are being implemented in a manner that will allow their deployment to seamlessly integrate or enhance existing PHIN based systems. To that end, we shall examine some of the challenges and potential solutions of applying the PHGrid Architecture with existing PHIN based infrastructures.