Day 4

I have little to report today because everything is going really well this year.  The teams I am working with are done with their planned testing and are moving on to stretch goals.  So I will spend a bit of time talking about the Connectathon monitors, most of whom are volunteers.

This year there are about 50 IHE Connectathon monitors and 4 managers, and another 5 HITSP monitors.  The connectathon monitors posed for a group shot which you can see below.  The guy laying on the floor in front of everybody is Steve Moore.  He's been involved in connectathons for a decade and runs the whole testing activity.  Many of the other people here have given up a week of their own time and traveled to the event to help with the testing.  A few of the monitors come from elsewhere in the IT industry and show up each year to help us out.  Others have been engaged in IHE for many years and have cochaired one of the technical committees or authored one or more of the profiles we are testing.

The connectathon monitors work very hard, and Steve the hardest of all.  Last year when we finished connectathon, we had on the order of 3000 tests processed by the connectathon monitors.  This week in the middle of day four we are already at that mark.   At our current rate, the monitors are processing around 125 tests an hour.

In addition to the Connectathon monitors, we also have 5 monitors reviewing conformance to the HITSP specifications. 

As a participant in the IHE Connectathon for the past 6 years, I have come to have a great deal of respect for the work of the connectathon monitors.  This is an immense undertaking that couldn't be done at all without them.  When we get to see the Certification process NPRM for meaningful use later this month, I hope that there will be opportunities in it to take advantage of all of the work that the IHE volunteers do at connectathon to enable interoperability testing and certification.

We will see many of the monitors again at the HIMSS showcase, as many also perform as docents at the HIMSS 2010 Interoperability Showcase.  Docents take people on tours of the Interoperability Showcase and walk them through the different demonstration scenarios.  There are still a few opportunities to participate in the showcase as a docent.  If you have some familiarity with Healthcare IT and interoperability and want to be a docent, contact me (see the Contact Me link at the upper right of this page), and I will forward your information along to the showcase organizers.

If you are a connectathon monitor, Thank you! for all your work. 
If you are a connectathon participant, please thank the monitors as well. 

Good  look to all and I'll see many of you next week at the HL7 Working Group Meeting in Phoenix.  Follow the activities there on twitter using #HL7WGM.

   Keith

P.S.  I appreciate hearing from all of you this week who read what I write here.  Keep the feedback coming, and if you disagree with anything I write here, post a comment.  Also, if there's a topic you'd like me to cover, drop me a line.  I can be educated...