MS-HUG TechForum - Day 2

Here is a quick summary of the sessions I attended today.

Clinical Messaging in a Services Oriented Architecture

The two Bob (Bob Long and Bob Gill) from Visiphor gave a presentation on the status of adoption of services across a number of projects with focus on something that is happening in Canada with Canada Health Infoway and the Health Information Access Layer (HIAL).

They spent some time talking about how they leverage the ESB Guidance to implement the regional hub for the Provincial Health Authorities in Canada.

It's good to see the work that Visiphor has done in aligning their message to the Connected Health Framework - Architecture and Design Blueprint, this is exactly what we were thinking when we started working on the CHF a couple of years ago.

The presentation is on the MS-HUG TechForum web site.

Service Standards in Healthcare

Colleague, fellow standards developer and good friend John Koisch gave a very interesting and elaborate presentation of the status of adoption of SOA in the industry and the difficulties associated to adopting services in Health IT.

As a member of the Health Services Specification Project (HSSP) within HL7, John also talked about the work that HL7 is doing to address that issue.

During the Q&A session an interesting question came up about the relation between the Connected Health Framework - Architecture and Design Blueprint and the HSSP work. While the two initiatives are pretty much proceeding in parallel, they are definitely based on the same principles and people adopting the CHF guidance will be in a good position to take advantage of the work done by HL7.

The presentation is on the MS-HUG TechForum web site.

Sepsis Screening Tool

This was a very cool session in that it addresses a big issue for hospitals worldwide: fighting sepsis.

I learned a lot of interesting statistics like the fact that death from sepsis ranks 10th among causes of death and that sepsis kills about 1,400 people a day worldwide.

This is a great case where applying technology (in small amounts) can solve some real problems and have immediate return on investment by improving patient safety and saving money to the hospitals.

I strongly suggest having a look at the presentation and what our partner Accent on Integration is doing.

Healthcare Enterprise Business Intelligence and Care Management

If are planning to do any BI work with your clinical data, definitely check out what Whole Health did. The project is very interesting and the only downside is that it is not currently available as an offering for someone to buy :-) but I can see how they can use the insight as a competitive advantage.

The aspect that interests me the most out of this project is the use of the HL7 Version 3.0 Reference Information Model (RIM) as a schema for the datawarehouse. As I say when teaching the Implementation Tutorial for HL7 V3 at the HL7 Working Group Meetings, there is a ton of value in the RIM and it is definitely a good thing to use it as the basis for these kinds of things.

As usual there will be cases where the RIM does not model concepts that you have to deal with, so be prepared to "embrace and extend". This project was not exception to that.

Now off to the Azyxxi presentation...

Comments

• Anonymous
  August 27, 2007
  I like the TechForum. It's a good opportunity for me to catch up with friends like John Koisch, Tom Canter,