Patient Care Technology Systems’ (PCTS) tracking solutions are all built on a common architecture and technical platform. They are composed of four main components: a web application tier, an interfacing tier, a tracking and locating tier and a database tier.
Web Application Tier
The primary end user application consists of web sites and web services which are built on robust and scalable service oriented architecture. The components in this tier are built using some of the latest technologies in the Microsoft® solution stack including .NET Frameworks, ASP.NET; and AJAX.NET among others. The components of this tier are generally deployed on an enterprise class web server. PCTS supports both physical and virtual server environments running Windows Server 2003 and IIS 6.0 or higher.
Tracking and Locating Tier
PCTS tracking applications utilize an assimilation server which is a real-time locating engine that is responsible for the integration of the PCTS applications with third party locating technologies. PCTS can integrate real-time location data from the leading RTLS technologies including active RFID, infrared, ultrasound, ultra-wideband, Wi-Fi and ZigBee. An orchestration server performs advanced real-time complex event and dynamic workflow rules processing. The components in this tier are generally deployed on an enterprise class server. PCTS supports both physical and virtual server environments running Windows Server 2003.
Database Tier
All of the tiers in the PCTS solution stack run on the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 platform. Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services is used for reporting. PCTS supports a variety of database deployment models and is ready to work with customers to support the solution that works best in their environment. We support running our databases on enterprise shared SQL Server environments as well as on dedicated hardware for the PCTS solutions.
Architecture Solution
Our architecture is flexible and scalable. One of the primary benefits of the "loosely coupled" nature of our architecture is the ability to adapt to a variety of deployment models. This allows our customers to dictate the requirements and constraints of the deployment model to ensure compliance with their internal IT strategy rather than having them imposed by the solution.
At the start of the implementation process PCTS will conduct an analysis with the customer's IT organization to determine the best deployment model. Hardware requirements can vary greatly based on the scale of the deployment and the redundancy requirements of the site. We will provide the site with detailed server specifications after we have a clear understanding of the scale of the solution and the preferred deployment model.
The PCTS solutions can run in virtualized server environments and the PCTS databases can be deployed on shared enterprise SQL Server environments.
