// HL7 Connection

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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For those Microsoft geeks that have been chomping at the bit to get an open-source .NET HL7 parser, your day has arrived. Ashley over at the Coditate blog has dug up a project that ports HAPI to .Net. I’ll add this to the links section, too. Be sure to take a look at the excellent help documentation that Ashley put together. Let me know what you think.

NHAPI Project

If talk of HL7 data types gets you excited, then run - don’t walk - on over to the latest ballot here. As if one data type isn’t enough to get excited about, the committee says that they are “currently pursuing two different work streams with the data types.” You can out more at the Mayo Clinic Wiki here.

via Living in the Material World

From Healthcare IT News, “Health Level Seven announced yesterday that it is seeking public comments on what it is calling the potential industry standard model for personal health record functionality. The PHR-system functional model offers guidelines on how to facilitate information exchange between PHRs and electronic health record systems, HL7 said in an announcement.”

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Aurelia Bustos has started a very worthwhile project called the OpenReg Project. Bustos “has started working on the development of an open-source project aimed to deliver free web based tools for the collection of tumor data needed for hospital tumor registries in Europe.” Many open source projects are inspired by bureaucratic inefficiencies and frustrations. The project plan is to leverage HL7 “for information interchange as well as will explore the leverage of semantic web technologies and cancer ontologies for automated data collection.”

I hope that as healthcare becomes a more global concern that others will support such initiatives in the open source space. Healthcare (whether software or service) will inevitably be free for everyone someday. Until then, we can support the ingenuity and passion of the few that take up the challenge of trying to make the world a little bit better than it is. Stop by and see if there is a way you can help:

cancersoftware.com