Conmergence

Nashville Medical Trade Center and the Proposed Nashville Entrepreneur Center

Milt Capps reported on the Nashville Medical Trade Center and the proposed Nashville Entrepreneur Center here. Given today's technology I'd like to suggest that instead of building a PLACE it would be more strategic to offer a slate of SERVICES; specifically, those which would concentrate on the nexus of bioinformatics, cloud computing and distributed computing. With the recent gains in virtualization, the global build out of broadband, and the Obama Administration emphasis on healthcare, eHealth, medical devices and sensors, both the figurative and literal medical home, it seems there's an awful lot of emphasis on the part of executives to re-create an 1980 business model instead of looking ahead at the healthcare horizon. Nashville already has plenty of data centers to throw at this problem; a voucher system to pay for a computing services testbed while companies are bootstrapped is a more prudent first step -- not to mention, tremendously less expensive to capitalize. Graduate studies at local higher education institutions, Internet2 and extant supercomputing capabilites at Oak Ridge should all be tapped first before other steps are taken.</ed.note>

Ken Rubin on Practical Guide to SOA in Healthcare

From SOA Consortium

The Practical Guide to SOA in Healthcare, an output of the Healthcare Services Specification Project (HSSP), is a collaborative work of the OMG Healthcare Task Force & Health Level 7 (HL7). The goal of HSSP is to develop SOA specifications for health, specifically defining healthcare business services to enable interoperability between organizations across the health domain.

While not a standard, the practical guide provides context and guidance for healthcare IT organizations and professionals considering SOA. Using a fictitious example, the practical guide presents an 8-step process to establish a healthcare SOA, from enterprise architecture through sustainment, and includes valuable lessons learned.

During his talk, Rubin spoke of the current state of global healthcare, and anticipated changes with the new U.S. administration and Health IT programs. Walking through the practical guide, meeting attendees were keenly interested in the healthcare function to service mapping and the reference architecture. Rubin emphasized that the reference architecture is a starting point for people to think about the problem, and extend and amend for their own situations.

IHE IT Infrastructure Domain 2007-2008 Profiles Public Comment

John Moehrke, Principal Engineer: Interoperability and Security, GE Healthcare, writes:

The IHE IT Infrastructure domain has released for public comment their 2007-2008 profiles and white papers. This comment period closes July 13th. ...Please feel free to comment to IHE.

You can find them at the IHE web site.

Web Services for IHE Transactions (Appendix V)

Retrieve Form for Data Capture (RFD)

Cross-Enterprise User Assertion (XUA)

Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing - b (XDS.b)

Cross Community Access (XCA)

Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing (XDS) Patient Identity Merge

XDS Affinity Domain Checklist White Paper

Wired for Health Quality Act

here. <ed.note>Note: Sec. 403. Facilitating the Provision of Telehealth Services Across State Lines</ed.note>

Can Medical Banking Connect the Healthcare IT Dots for Politicians?

<ed.note>John Casillas testified today before the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) American Health Information Community concerning the medical banking vision of a unified view and unified platform to connect EHR|PHR, real-time adjudication, Healthcare Savings Accounts, High Deductible Health Plans, Consumer Driven Healthcare. AHIC decided at its November 29, 2005 meeting to form workgroups in the following areas: biosurveillance, consumer empowerment, chronic care, and electronic health records. Subsequently, at the May 16, 2006 Community meeting, two additional groups were formed: the Biosurveillance Data Steering Group as a sub-workgroup within the Biosurveillance Workgroup (renamed Population Health and Clinical Care Connections Workgroup), and the Confidentiality, Privacy & Security Workgroup, which was created as a cross-cutting workgroup responsible for an issue relevant to all the workgroups. More recent, at the August 1, 2006, meeting, the Community formed the Quality Workgroup to address the need for the development of quality measures; and at the October 31, 2006, meeting, the Personalized Healthcare Workgroup was formed to develop and make recommendations on standards for interoperable integration of genomic test information into personal e-health records.</ed.note>

LinkedIn OpenHealthCare Group Launched

<ed.note>In order to better network between the various OS efforts touching healthcare I asked LinkedIn to set up a group. If you're a biz dev, booster, coder, contributor, venture-type, the invite is here.</ed.note>

UDEF and Electronic Health Records

Ron Schuldt writes:

For those who have not read the President’s Health Information Technology Plan, I recommend that you see the following 

I offer the following based on my assumption that an individual’s electronic health record will include topics such as:

Electronic Health Record Information (identification)

Patient Information (identification, address, phone number, date of birth, gender)

Primary Care Doctor Information (identification, address, phone number)

Insurance Coverage Information (identification, address, phone number)

Medical Conditions (identification and time period)

Medical Treatment Process (identification and time period)

Medical Treatment Substances (identification and time period)

Assuming the above topics and probably others are expected to be an integral part of an individual’s electronic health record, I offer the following UDEF names and IDs for each topic. Note: Proposed UDEF extensions are in italics

ASC X12 WEDI Real-Time Adjudication Conference – Schedule Overview

DAY 1, Tuesday, February 13, 2007

7:30 a.m. – 5:15 p.m.: Conference Registration

7:30 a.m. – 8:30 a.m.: Continental Breakfast

8:30 a.m. – 9:00 a.m.: Welcome Presentation & Conference Overview

Dan Kazzaz, ASC X12 Chair

Jim Whicker, WEDI Chair

9:00 a.m. – 10:15 a.m.: Current State of Batch Claim Processing

J Robert Barbour, VP Finance for MD Services & Tech Development, Montefiore

Medical Center

Rick Click, CIO, Molina Healthcare

Brian Cutler, President, Mercury Data Exchange

10:15 a.m. – 10:45 a.m.: Networking Break

10:45 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.: Spurring Healthcare into “Real-Time” Through

Collaboration

Jim Lacy, CFO & General Counsel, ZirMed

Fran Watkins, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida

Kenneth Willman, Director of Provider Interface, Humana

Ginger Wright, HIPAA Compliance Manager, The Availity Health Information

Network

12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m.: Conference Luncheon

1:00 p.m. – 2:15 p.m.: Roadblocks to Real-Time Adjudication

Lynne Gilbertson, Director of Standards Development, NCPDP

Gwendolyn Lohse, Project Director, CAQH

Maggie Ohara or Tara Mondock, IVANS

Fred Richards, CTO, HTP, Inc.

2:15 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.: Really Real Time Implementations of Real-Time Adjudication

David Boucher, AVP of Healthcare Service, BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina

Allen DeGraw, Founder & CEO, Post-N-Track Corporation

Barnet Dreistadt, Director, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida

Amy Hinrichs, Director, Provider Portal, UnitedHealthGroup

3:30 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.: Networking Break

UK National Health Service (NHS) National Programme for Information Technology uses ebXML Messaging (update)

I’m pleased to announce that a new case study was posted at the ebXML.org Web site:

http://www.ebxml.org/case_studies/NHS-ebMSG-casestudy-041206.pdf

The UK's National Programme for Information Technology (NPfIT) is the world's largest civil IT project. A central component of the NHS Care Records Service is the Transactional Messaging Service (TMS) Spine using the ebXML Messaging Service OASIS Standard.

The Transaction and Messaging Service provides the communications infrastructure for the National Programme. It serves to interconnect regional network clusters managed by Local Service Providers (LSPs) and national services such as systems for electronic booking and transmission of prescriptions. The technology framework used for TMS is based on a large number of advanced technical specifications and standards. This includes the ebXML Messaging Service OASIS Standard. Within the TMS Spine, ebXML is used to provide reliable messaging functionality. National services such as the Electronic Booking Service (Choose and Book) and Electronic Transmission of Prescriptions are accessed using pairs of XML request and response documents. These documents are transported within the NHS network as ebXML messages.

With an anticipated yearly volume of over 5.000.000.000 message by 2010, TMS is likely to be among the largest messaging systems in production in the world. For this very reason, TMS is also likely to be among the larger systems worldwide that will use the ebXML Messaging OASIS Standard. 

Sincere congratulations to everyone involved in this very significant project!

Pim van der Eijk

# # # #

David Webber adds at ebxml forum news:

NHS 'Choose & Book' gearing up with ebXML - 16,000 daily transactions

In 2004 the UK National Health Service NHS adopted ebXML messaging for its mission critical Transactional Messaging Services (TMS) Spine. Anticipated annual message volume by 2010 is over 5,000,000,000 for managing healthcare in the UK from all sources - email, smartcard payments and ebXML.

At the OASIS Adoption Forum in London in November, 2006 the key-note presentation by Dr. Mark Ferrar, Director of Infrastructure, NHS Connecting for Health reported that the 'Choose and Book' system is now generating upward of 16,000 transactions daily with over 1.7 million generated so far this year.

The ebXML messaging is a foundation service as part of the SPINE architecture. Dr. Ferrar gives comprehensive details of the scale of the technology that NHS is implementing and the scope involving already 98% of doctors offices in the UK.

ebBP News - ebBP in OASIS Standard Vote!

Everyone, The ebBP v2.0.4 vote for OASIS Standard vote began 16 November (vote: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/ballot.php?id=1150) and continues to 30 November 2006. The response thus far has been favorable. In support of business collaboration, ebBP is a valuable addition to the OASIS Standard specification set and to the marketplace. We encourage those that work with OASIS or have voting organizational members to cast their affirmative ballot by 30 November 2006 and to enable the next step to promote to ISO-15000 standard. For those of you that have voted or encouraged your community to do so, we appreciate the support. For others, we trust you will pass along this information on our behalf.

The ebBP (ebXML Business Process Specification Schema) is a business collaboration process standard useful for monitoring rather than an executable language. The ebBP enables the collaborative or eBusiness processes relevant to trading partners across enterprises or collaborating parties.  It could also map to WS-BPEL that engage processes within an enterprise.As a business collaboration definition targeted specifically for and developed by business communities, ebBP is well-positioned for eBusiness. For example, our TC has worked with user communities in Italy, the Netherlands, Asia, and the United Kingdom on sample or actual real-world process definitions. We've also worked with Universal Business Language (UBL) to create modular process definitions that support that OASIS standard and ebBP.

The permanent locations for the v2.04 packages are found at: http://docs.oasis-open.org/ebxml-bp/2.0.4/. The public web site is located at: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=ebxml-bp.

ebBP is also in the news:
1. METU has provided an updated ebBP Editor Tool. See: http://sourceforge.net/cvs/?group_id=154705. Their cumulative efforts are important to eHealth and to the domain of businessprocess in general. Congratulations to METU!
2. We've now posted sample Japanese process definitions from JEITA. See: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/20133/ecom-jeita-ebbp-samples-definitions-aug2006.zip.
3. ebBP and the framework ebXML technologies were recently featured at Linux World. Stay tuned for more information.
4. More is to come too from Object Management Group as ebBP has contributed to their work on Business Process Definition Metamodel (BPDM) and Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). The experience around and requirements for choreography and business collaboration from ebBP experts has positively received by those groups. As their work evolves, so will the functionality to support our primary areas of interest.

All referenced information and more is available on our public web site that includes:

Frequently Asked Questions

ebBP Overview

Multiple sample process definitions for including those from UBL SBS, Italian knit wear, CPP/A negotiation, JEITA and more.

Business signal examples

Links to the current ebBP editor

The ebBP TC would greatly appreciate your support and vote for advancing ebBP to OASIS Standard.

Regards.
Dale Moberg, US Axway
Monica J. Martin, Sun Microsystems
[for the OASIS ebXML Business Process TC (ebBP)]