Quote Of The Year

Timeless Quotes - Sadly The Late Paul Shetler - "Its not Your Health Record it's a Government Record Of Your Health Information"

or

H. L. Mencken - "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."

Wednesday, September 30, 2015

FHIR IS Really Starting To Make Some Real Headway! Look Forward To Reports From The Field On Successful Use.

This appeared a few days ago.

FHIR DSTU2 is published

Posted on September 22, 2015 by Grahame Grieve
The FHIR team is pleased to announce that FHIR DSTU is now published at http://hl7.org/fhir. The 2nd DSTU is an extensive rewrite of all parts of the specification. Some of the highlights this version accomplishes:
  • Simplifies the RESTful API
  • Extends search and versioning significantly
  • Increases the power and reach of the conformance resources and tools
  • Defines a terminology service
  • Broadens functionality to cover new clinical, administrative and financial areas
  • Incorporates thousands of changes in existing areas in response to trial use
As part of publishing this version, we have invested heavily in the quality of the process and the specification, and the overall consistency is much improved. A full list of changes to the FHIR standard can be found at http://hl7.org/fhir/history.html#history.
In addition, DSTU2 is published along with several US-realm specific implementations developed in association with the ONC: DAF, SDC, and QICore.
More here:
All we can do now is make sure those who need to know are planning how FHIR fits into their future so that when the final Standard is available as its Version 1 they are ready to adopt - if they haven’t already. It becomes clearer by the day there is something very useful emerging here!
How far FHIR has come is illustrated in the following blog from Thomas Beale.

Yet another e-health standards comparison, corrected

25/09/2015 wolandscat
Recently HSCIC and NHS England published an Interoperability Handbook, intended to help provider CIOs and others steer the difficult waters of obtaining interoperable health IT solutions. The target audience is listed as:
CCG Clinical Leaders, Chief Clinical Information Officers, Chief Information Officers, Directors IMT
so the publication can be understood primarily as an aid to procurement and in-house planning and development of EHR and other clinical information solutions.
I won’t provide a proper analysis of the document here, other than to say that it is likely to be a useful resource for its audience, and a good starting point for ongoing conversations and education in the e-health solutions area within the NHS (even just establishing standard nomenclature in the NHS for talking about the relevant concepts is a worthwhile exercise). Interoperable solutions are a huge engineering enterprise, so hopefully it will be understood that documents like this one act as useful reference points, but in no way replace the needed human resources and competencies to plan and deliver actual solutions.
However, I do have some comments…
One of the things the document does is to identify technical standards for use in the planning, development and procurement activities. Since procurement is widely recognised to be one of the weakest points in the NHS environment (at least in terms of outcomes for broad health data interoperability), understanding and being able to use standards is a crucial part of establishing a platform environment for sustainable health computing.
Lots more here:
What Tom shows is where FHIR (and openEHR and many others) fit in the scheme of things and how the Standards present and future fit together. It also shows that there is a wide scope we need to successfully address to really get the information and knowledge flows we need in the Health Domain.
We are slowly making headway I reckon, but jinx there is a lot of hard work still to come. It is clear when looking at all this those seeing the PCEHR as the answer to even a small part of that ails us as smoking something that is probably illegal.
David.

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