by Matthew ~ October 25th, 2007
Here’s the summary from Microsoft’s MSDN, “Empowering patients and consumers to exchange Electronic Health Records securely is a big debate in the health industry across the globe. Learn how to use Office Open XML Formats and custom XML formats to exchange data securely.” Microsoft even provides some sample templates for Office 2007 developers. The full title for this 24 pager is, “Using Office Open XML Formats to Support Electronic Health Records Portability and Health Industry Standards”. Knock yourself out…
Continue reading… [via David's Blog]
by Matthew ~ October 25th, 2007
There’s an interview with HL7’s new CTO, John Quinn, in this month’s Healthcare Informatics. Quinn is also Chief Techie in Accenture’s U.S. Provider Practice. I’ve worked with Accenture in the past and they have considerable experience in this area. It’s going to be interesting to see where Quinn wants to take HL7. Even though he’s been around for the past 18 years, perhaps he has some new ideas. I vote for less academia and bit more pragmatism.
Read the interview…
by Matthew ~ October 24th, 2007
Version 0.2.50 of the Ruby-HL7 library has been released. The library provides a simple API for parsing and generating HL7 2.x messages. This release is a maintenance release, it fixes an incompatibility with the latest facets release. HL7 3.0 support is planned for a future release
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by Matthew ~ October 9th, 2007
The goal of HL7 is to make the exchange of healthcare information more accurate and more efficient. This goal is becoming more realistic with new projects that are consolidating and opening access to medical professionals online. However, this is making people a bit squeamish about sharing such personal data. To many, their medical information should be more protected than their financial data. The irony is that so many people have been working towards this goal for years and now that a real solution is approaching, the public may not want it. Medical professionals certainly want and need access to this information but is that a compelling enough argument? Continue reading »
by Matthew ~ September 10th, 2007
There was an interesting article on the Daily Kos over the weekend, “EHR, Electronic Medical Records - The Doc Loses” by J.D. Wolverton which critiques the state of American electronic medical records (EMR). Wolverton says, “The US government has issued standards via HIPAA. These work because they primarily focus on revenue issues, but standardizing the medical chart itself remains a problem. HL7 specifies how data is transferred from one place to another, but HIPAA doesn’t specify how the data is viewed or entered by the end users. We have standards, but it’s left to physicians, hospitals and other medical providers to figure out how to pay for it without getting any funding for it.”
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