I'm currently engaged in developing the next generation backend infrastructure for a notable national Danish healthcare service, the Shared Medicine Card; in which we are evaluating Riak as a foundation for providing both high availability, scalability and the ability to run off multiple data centers. In this talk I'll share our experiences, explain our approach, the pitfalls that we fell into on the way, the data designs we ended up with, and talk about which use cases are good fits for Riak.
The Shared Medicine Card (in Danish "Fælles Medicinkort" or FMK for short) provides access to Danish citizen's medication prescriptions, drug usage, as well as history, monitoring for those. In addition to being available as an online service both for human and systemic consumption, a large integration project is currently under rollout so that by the end of 2011 it will be the back bone for drug information for some 40+ systems across such diverse medical professional systems as general practitioners, hospitals, specialist doctors, and home nursing.The project is a noticeable success, and recently won the Digitization Prize as "best government IT project in Denmark".
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Kresten Krab Thorup is CTO of Trifork, a public Danish company providing software solutions to government and financial services providers. Trifork is also creator of the long-running JAOO conference, and co-creator of QCon. As Trifork CTO Kresten in responsible for technical strategy, and spends most of the time acting as internal consultant, researching future technologies, as well as being editor for JAOO and QCon conferences. Kresten has also been a principal contributor to Trifork's own Java EE certified application server "Trifork T4", where he authored the built-in CORBA ORB, a custom Java RMI implementation (now part of Apache Yoko), the transaction manager, the database connection management system, and the Java byte code rewriting subsystem.
Kresten has been a contributor to several open source projects, including GCC, GNU Objective-C, GNU Compiled Java, Emacs, and Apache Geronimo/Yoko. Before joining Trifork, Kresten worked at NeXT Software (now acquired by Apple), where he was responsible for the development of the Objective-C tool chain, the debugger, and the runtime system. Kresten was on the committee for JSR-14 (adding generics to Java) which was closely related to the subject of his Ph.D. thesis.
Most recently, Kresten has founded the Erjang open source project (notice the J there), a virtual machine for Erlang running on the Java Virtual Machine.
Kresten is member of GOTO Aarhus Program Advisory Board
