Friday, November 28, 2014

Fwd: Call for Participation; #MHD - #XDS on #FHIR

The MHD profile, which is most quickly described as XDS on FHIR, is getting revised this winter. I have been working with a small group of IHE members to align the original MHD concept with the Resources that I worked with Grahame to model in FHIR, soon to be controlled by a joint IHE-HL7 workgroup. Since this profile is not following the normal IHE lifecycle, it is not ready for formal testing at IHE-Connectathon. But we want to do some testing at IHE-Connectathon, so we are going to use what IHE calls "New Directions". The new MHD pairs nicely with PDQm and IUA.

Note I removed the webinar details from this post, but they are available upon request.
Colleagues:

As you are no doubt aware, there is a great deal of industry buzz around the application of RESTful technologies and FHIR Resources to IHE profiles. MHD is a profile that is considered a prime candidate, and according to the interest received to date, is likely to garner a high level of adoption.

We are contacting you as a potential participant in an exciting opportunity to collaborate on the testing & development of the new Mobile Access to Health Documents (MHD) IHE profile, utilizing HL7's emerging FHIR® standard. "XDS on FHIR" is one of several innovation projects comprising the New Directions program during the IHE North American Connectathon being held in Cleveland OH, January 26-30, 2015.

Be part of a handful of selected vendors that realize the potential of being an active contributor and an early adopter. Here is your opportunity to get the jump on your competitors and get in the game!

You are invited to join program sponsors IHE USA, HIMSS, NIST and HealtheWay in a webinar that will explain the "MHD on FHIR" opportunity in January, and what is required in order for your company to participate. We have prepared a slide deck for the webinar, which is attached for your advance perusal.

Please join us for the webinar on Tuesday, December 02, 2014 @ 12:00 Noon – 1:00 PM, CST (Central Standard Time). This webinar will be recorded .
The plan at a glance:
  • Testing of MHD on FHIR in New Directions will take place for 2 days only, on Wed January 28 10am-5pm and Thurs Jan 29 9am-noon during the IHE North American Connectathon week of January 26-30, 2015. The event will be held at the Cleveland Convention Center and HIMSS Innovation Center, 1 St. Clair Ave NE, Cleveland OH 44114.
  • Participants will be testing submission of documents using FHIR technology, as defined for IHE's MHD profile. Participants will be testing with a tool developed by NIST as well as with each other peer-to-peer.
  • A candidate for participation is a developer for a company that has successfully tested an XDS Document Registry, Document Repository, and/or Document Source actor at a North American or European Connectathon within the past 3 years. We would expect the participant to bring an implementation of an MHD Source to make a Document Submission, and/or an MHD Recipient to receive a Document Submission.
  • Prior to face-to-face testing on Jan 28-29, participants will be expected to participate in periodic calls to stay apprised of developments in the MHD specification and to test with the NIST tools as they are released.

Thursday, November 13, 2014

IHE ITI Plan for 2015

The IHE ITI slate for 2015 has just been agreed to. This is a balancing act between the Planning Committee that evaluates the need and desire for the item to be Profiled by IHE; against the Technical Committee that evaluates the technical feasibility of creating the Profile in a way that will be used. The Technical committee thus evaluates if there are standards available to be profiled, as IHE really should not invent a standard. The Technical committee evaluates how mature those standards are, where standards like FHIR are considered risky but usable. The Technical Committee also must worry about availability of expertise to complete and review the work.

The Planning committee asked for 10 items to be worked on, which is simply too many things to work on. So we looked at how we could change-the-scope, or move ‘when’ the item is worked on. We laid out the work items into a calendar to make sure we were not working on too many items at any one time. Preferably no more than five work items at any point in time.



This is not intended to be a formal chart, it was just used to help us balance the workload. The color is not that important, although it does make it an eye-popping chart. The intensity of the color, or lack of intensity is an indicator of low load by that work item at that month. The number is the number of phone meetings on the topic.

This shows that we are expecting to complete early, for a January Public Comment phase, the MHD, DSG, and XDW-XCA work item. While also delaying start on a De-Identification project and a Documentation cleanup project.

Introduction to Work Items:

  1. RESTful ATNA – This work item proposes to provide a way that a reporting application can query into an ATNA repository for various use-cases. Likely to use the FHIR SecurityEvent resource, but there is a desire to expand beyond those specific types of logged events.
  2. Alerts targeted at Humans – This work item proposes to create a way to send alert messages (Not life critical) to one or more recipient. It is a very scaled down proposal that will start a family of solutions. First up is to determine what our scope actually will be.
  3. RESTful PIX – This work item proposes to provide a query into a PIX Manager for a cross-reference. This is just the query transaction from the PIX profile, but using FHIR. This will likely be based on FHIR Patient, and be similar to PDQm.
  4. MHD-2 – This is the version 2 of MHD. The goal is to get this out to Public Comment in January so that the USA IHE Connectathon can do some limited and targeted testing, under “New Directions”.
  5. DE-ID (for Family Planning) – This work item starts with a QRPH profile on Family Planning, and create a De-Identification profile that shows how the data could be de-identified for specific purposes. This will be the first formal use of the De-Identification handbook.
  6. DSG – This is a project I started last year to update the Document-Digital-Signature profile to the current IHE documentation template, and possibly improve it. Not intended to take on major new use-cases, but some.
  7. Re-Documentation – This is an effort similar to the Volume 3 cleanup we have done, but this time focused on fixing up Volume 2. The intention to make the XD* transactions more readable, and harmonize the wording. No intention to change any technical detail.
  8. XDW-XCA – This is an item started a few years ago to extend XDW capability beyond one XDS domain. The proposal creates two new supplements to do this support.
  9. German/French National Extensions – Both Germany and France have provided national extensions to the PAM profile. These need to be managed and ultimately published in Volume 4.
  10. Change Proposals – There is always change proposals to work…