IHE PCC Week

For the last week I've been at the IHE PCC Face to Face meeting to resolve public comments on the various profiles that were published for public comment more than a month ago.  The Request Clinical Knowledge (RCK) profile got some excellent feedback from members of the HL7 Clinical Decision Support Workgroup.  One of the standards we had considered for the RCK profile was the HL7 Infobutton SOA Guide.  However, we decided not to persue it too far when we realized that the guide contained so much SOAP-based content. Most Infobutton implementations today seem to use the RESTful URL Implementation guide, and so we focused on that and the original standard.  It's been a bit hard to track what is going on with Infobutton in HL7 these days, because some of the final implementation guides seem to be ahead of the balloted model, although consistent with where it is going.

There was some excellent give and take in the discussions with the CDS workgroup over the last week, and it seems that several of the things we did "differently" are going to show up in new guides that they will have coming out for ballot in the near future.  One concern I have for this profile is what happens in a month of so when Meaningful Use Stage 2 arrives.  Will we be "in sync" with the final rule, or not?  I'm hoping that we will be.  If ONC names Release 3 of the URL guide, we'll be in great shape with this profile,  because it does comply with it.

The updated text is already on the IHE FTP site, and should be headed off for trial implementation as of tomorrow (actually today now).  I'm preparing a bunch of Just-In-Time training content on Quality Standards for next week.  By the time the ballots are finished and reconciled, I'll already have classes done for QRDA and HQMF, and who knows, I might even start that second or third book soon.

In other news, the IHE MHD profile (Documents for Mobile Health) also seems to be coming along.  We were all rather frustrated with the dearth of feedback received, but I'm still excited with the results.