New LogicNets Features

LogicNets is pleased to announce Release 8.1, the latest version of the LogicNets decision support application development platform, which will be generally available to licensed customers starting in July 2024. This release introduces new features for streamlined authoring for multiple designers and projects. It offers collaboration functionality as well as digital healthcare content integration and interoperability. It also includes a major internal infrastructure upgrade for the LogicNets platform, significantly enhancing performance and security. Complete details will be available in the LogicNets Community Portal. The following are new feature highlights for customers to consider regarding the value and timeline for upgrading.

Authoring

LogicNets Release 8.1 significantly improves the content authoring experience and capabilities. Highlights include Shared Workspaces and the Deployment Manager, new platform components that enable sophisticated collaboration and simplify large-scale deployment. The release also introduces new content modeling features to simplify and streamline the authoring process underlying your most complex applications.

Project Versioning and Shared Workspaces

Release 8.1 enables greater content lifecycle management and effective collaboration. The Base System (LN-B) builds on previous content versioning capabilities with new automated project-level versioning. This provides sophisticated tracking and control over applications as they evolve.

The release also introduces Shared Workspaces (LN-WSP) — a new LogicNets platform component that enables collaboration among authoring staff or even between teams of authors. Multiple designer users, each working with their own content, can now use project versioning and Shared Workspaces to efficiently share and jointly develop, manage, and deploy their applications between multiple user or organizational workspaces. The component requires its own licenses and is a valuable new option for applications with:

• Multiple authoring participants
• Frequent content updating and version creation
• Numerous underlying projects/packages potentially on independent maintenance and release cycles
• Sophisticated deployment and lifecycle management needs
• Enterprise-level or mission-critical production processing status

Using project versioning, Shared Workspaces allows designer users to set up virtual content repositories to place select versions of their projects to securely share with other internal or external users they invite for collaboration or joint access. These users can provide read-only or read/write access to their content, and the system combines versioning with an easy-to-use check-in/check-out capability so multi-user collaboration does not threaten content integrity and enables flexibility for the proper management of content — even with multiple owners, editors, and reviewers.

Deployment Manager for Large-Scale or Enterprise Production Use

The new Deployment Manager (LN-WSP-D) is an additional component you can acquire as an optional feature of Shared Workspaces. It provides a dashboard for managing the complete collection of LogicNets executable packages generated from Shared Workspaces and deployed for production use. Users can see all available packages, publish new versions, control how they distribute different versions for runtime execution, and track their status. Users deploying LogicNets for enterprise or mission-critical use are highly encouraged to acquire this option.

Content Modeling Enhancements

Modeling Efficiency

The LogicNets Release 8.1 Designer (LN-D) includes new features to streamline content modeling and eliminate time-consuming steps, allowing you to create and maintain applications more efficiently.

“Copy-Paste” Support for Form Parts – It has often been time-consuming for content designers to create and edit tables or lists — such as radio lists, checklists, and smartgrids — with long or complex components. Previously, designer users typed in and edited each row or item individually. Now, users can select content into their system clipboard and drop it into a LogicNets Part editor to create an entire table or list in one action. Designer users can automatically set LogicNets to parse Excel, Word, and RTF tables and correctly insert data into the modeled content.

Designer Profiles—With Release 8.1, LogicNets allows you to create Designer user profiles that set the options you see in part editor tabs, helping you efficiently group, isolate, or simply function. This feature helps make designing less complex for inexperienced users while providing more advanced functionality to specialist designers.

Sticky Part Editor Tabs –The new “Sticky Tabs” feature opens part editors to the last tab the user accessed by default, speeding up modeling and editing.

Route-on-Output for Checklist and Text/Number Input Forms – Previously, route-on-output was only available for radio list nodes. With Release 8.1, it is also available for checklists, text, and number input form parts. Including routing in all common input nodes means that designers no longer need to explicitly model rules to direct navigation and suppress the display of follow-on questions if no answer has been provided to the current question.

“Check All” and “Uncheck All” Options for Checklists – Checklist parts now have a built-in parameter to allow users to select Check and/or Uncheck all list options without having to explicitly model the logic necessary to achieve the same result.

Enhanced Multi-Language Support Management (LN-MLS) Tools – For users of the MLS component, we’ve added a powerful new search and navigation tool that allows users to find and list any translated content items and click on them to navigate to the relevant node to see the context in which they are used. The new Translation tab in the Search panel of the Designer makes it easier to find and manage translated content, even in multiple projects and workspaces. Users can now easily find duplicate or unused content and remediate issues directly from a new translation table editor available from within the Search panel itself.

System Robustness

LogicNets Release 8.1 Base System (LN-B) includes enhancements to and hardening of the LogicNets core infrastructure, continuing the substantial work implemented in Release 8.0, which included an upgrade to LUA v5.4, LogicNets’ embedded high-performance scripting language. The following enhancements improved system performance, availability, and security.

64-Bit Operation—LogicNets updated all components to 64-bit. This capability benefits your LogicNets applications with performance improvements, increased memory access capabilities, improved stability, and compatibility with the latest hardware and hosting infrastructure.

NIST SP 800-92 Auditing Compliance – LogicNets continuously collects data about runtime operation, events, and usage and stores it in standard log files managed within the system. You can extract and process this data for a wide range of analyses and insights. This release includes enhanced continuous monitoring to include events related to compliance with evolving security standards as outlined in the NIST Special Publication 800-92 guidance and specification for security log management.

Third-Party Library – LogicNets includes licensed embedded third-party software components, and this release includes updates to these components, helping ensure compliance with modern security requirements and delivering enhanced functionality.

Asynchronous API processing – In Release 8.1, LogicNets enhanced the Web Services Framework (LN-WSF) with asynchronous processing. Web Services you create with the WSF will have improved scalability, responsiveness, and resource utilization, and the runtime server will now be capable of allowing asynchronous client polling of status and the ability to generate real-time progress bars.

Healthcare Integration and Interoperability

LogicNets recently restructured how we package healthcare-specific component functions and introduced the Healthcare Integration and Interoperability Suite (HI&I) in 2023. This suite of components focuses on enabling tight integration and interoperability between LogicNets applications and the external healthcare workflow. Much of our strategy in further developing these components has been around supporting clearly evolving new healthcare standards, such as FHIR. We standardized the following two products from the HI&I Suite, now generally available in Release 8.1.

FHIR Export Questionnaire Step-by-Step Feature

The FHIR Export Module (LN-FQE), introduced in Release 8.0, allows LogicNets-managed clinical guideline content to be accessed and exported via API in a standard FHIR Questionnaire format.  This allows the content to be rendered independently of LogicNets using third-party tools, including generic FHIR-based applications.    With this release, LogicNets has enhanced the functionality so a client application can interactively navigate the questionnaire, submit requests, and receive responses step-by-step. This approach allows the client to execute clinical guideline content more quickly and process less information on the client side. For partners implementing LogicNets digitalized guidelines to operate within their workflow systems, the step-by-step feature helps create a significantly more efficient user experience while reducing the product development effort.

CDS Hooks Framework Available Package Discovery

The CDS Hooks Framework (LN-CDS) makes LogicNets-managed clinical content available through a standard FHIR-based API supporting the CDS Hooks interoperability method from HL7. Release 8.1 enhanced this functionality to support a powerful new request type. The Available Package Discovery feature allows a client to access a LogicNets application web service and query the system for all available LogicNets content relevant to a particular situation or patient scenario. With this capability, you can generically write guidance without needing complex logic to identify and apply the applicable guidance automatically. Organizations digitalizing large numbers of guidelines or protocols can now aggregate their production-ready content within the LogicNets environment without having to update or specifically develop the application request system.

Printable Version

If you’re interested in checking out Version 8.1, get started with a Free Trial today.