The May HL7 Working Group Meeting

The May HL7 Working Group Meeting was held at the Hotel Windsor Barra in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.  Getting to the meeting was a challenge for many HL7 members.  United Flight 861 from Dulles Airport in Washington DC was rescheduled due to a mechanical problem, leaving several hundred travelers waiting nearly 15 hours for a new plane.  The replacement flight stopped in Saõ Paulo and did not go on to Rio, which required rebooking for those headed to Rio.  I was one of those travelers and had already spent 6 hours waiting for the plane.  US Air Flight 800 out of Charlotte, NC had issues with navigation instruments and turned back after getting not quite half way their.  They fixed the problem after a while and turned around, only to realize that they had been in the air too long (read: not enough fuel), and then turned around again to land back in the US.  A flight from Puerto Rico had weather problems landing in Texas, and had to land at another airport to refuel, causing that contingent to miss their connection to Rio.  Most of us eventually arrived, safely I might add.  The meeting was not as lightly attended as Kyoto, but not as heavily attended as meeting in the US.  I'm told that there were more than 200 in attendance in Rio.

I spent Monday with the Structured Documents Workgroup.  We reviewed the weeks agenda, approved an updated mission and charter for the workgroup which will be posted on the SDWG site once approved by the TSC.  We also updated our governance (which again requires further approval).  The Structured Documents workgroup follows the usual workgroup processes with one exception:  Quorum is 5 members (with balance), and must include two cochairs. We also updated our three year plan.  That completed the first half of Monday.  The second half was consumed with hearing about Template tooling and template registry efforts.  The template tooling pilot ran an example template through three different technologies to develop templates.  The first of these are the Model Driven Health Tools that several HL7 tooling developers have been writing in Eclipse.  This is a very cool tool, and you can find out more about it at the website.  I recommend taking a look at it.  The second was an illustration of template development using the Static Model Designer being developed by HL7 UK members as a replacement for the current Visio tooling.  This is also pretty cool stuff, but requires more experience in HL7ese.  Both tools were up to the job of developing the templates in the pilot.  The last prototype wasn't discussed due to a mixup in scheduling.

I also gave a report out to the SDWG on progress on the Templates Registry Pilot.  If you've been following me, you know my hard drive had an unfortunate meeting with a coke bottle a few weeks ago.  I don't back up installed software because it inevitably has to be reinstalled again, so I lost several days work and haven't been able to catch up because there was other (more urgent) software to be reinstalled.  I'm back on that this week.  We did review the platform configuration and the Data Model for the registry.

I spent part of Monday with the Marketing Committee discussing the HL7 Ambassador program.  We will be putting together a set of Ambassador talks around Meaningful Use (which includes the CDA/CCD talk that I give), and promote that session for the Cambridge Working Group meeting in October.  We also discussed the new Ambassador webinars (see earlier press release today).  I will be giving one on CDA and CCD later this year (and in other venues sooner).

Tuesday early morning was the Education Breakfast.  I slept miserably the night before (a bit of Montezuma's revenge caught me), but managed to attend and was better by Q2.  We reviewed classes and education schedules for the Cambridge WGM, and talked about some new content that needs to be developed (specifically around SOA).

I spent some time Tuesday afternoon with the ITS Workgroup, discussing hData activities and the MicroITS.  We reviewed the current set of requirements for a Micro-ITS and the Micro-ITS tool developed by Robert Warden (building from the MDHT work if I remember correctly).  At that meeting we agreed to move the Micro-ITS work forward as a ballotable item to set contraints around what a Micro-ITS is and isn't, and how they relate to the HL7 RIM. 

I tried to join the Security workgroup later in the day, but ran into problems since I hadn't brought my Skype headset downstairs.  It was hard to follow the meeting when everyone else in the room was using Skype and several others were present (but not in the room).  After about 5 minutes we had a network problem and that meeting effectively broke up.  I spent the rest of my time that day slightly misplaced, thinking I was going to the ARB meeting on SAIF Tuesday Q4 (turns out that I was supposed to be at Wednesday Q4).  It was fine anyway, because I got to hear the ARB address Lloyd's comments on SAIF, many of which were well made.

Wednesday morning a couple of members of the SDWG (including me) met with the EHR workgroup to review the current status of the mapping of interoperability requirements from CDA based on the EHR Functional Model.  There were two formal proposals to CDA Release 3 (Audit and Access Controls) whose status were reviewed.  The first was rejected by structured documents as it covers a feature of a medical records management system, not a clinical document.  The latter was accepted to support marking of the sensitivity of a document with multiple sensitivity codes (these are found in the misnamed "confidentialityCode" attribute in the clinical document).

During lunch I was "interviewed" by the chair of the Patient Care workgroup, who was gathering data on use of the Care Provision messages developed by that workgroup.  I'm the author of several IHE profiles, including Query for Existing Data, Care Management and Request for Clinical Guidance that use these, as well as having developed a prototype implementation for one of our products.  So, he got an earful from me, and I owe him a followup e-mail.

Early Wednesday afternoon I again met with the ITS workgroup, and we reviewed again the requirements of a MicroITS.  Charlie McCay had a number of good questions and as a result I nominated him to help me write up the MicroITS requirements that we agreed would be balloted next cycle.

Late Wednesday afternoon I met with the TSC to review progress on the respelled SAIF (See previous posts on SAEAF Revisted and Demystifying SAEAF ... Maybe).  We talked about the feedback that the ARB and TSC has recieved on SAIF so far, and reviewed a presentation by the technical services workgroup that explained how HL7 artifacts could map into the framework.  This is where TSC chair Charlie McCay uttered the now famous: "The resolution to that [issue] is that I'm stuffed and I still have work to do" in response to a query for people who could help him finish up some SAIF deliverables.

Thursday morning I spent with the Templates workgroup, and we repeated the discussions that we had jointly with them in Structured Documents Monday afternoon on platform configuration and the data model.  I really must get back to work on the build environment, and get those parts and documentation loaded into GForge or OHT, so I'll sign off with that.