2011: A Year in Review at HIMSS12

HIMSS is always a bit like New Year's Day for me.  It provides a pretty clear dividing line between what I did last year, and what I'm doing in the year to come.   Quite a bit of what I worked on for the last year shows up in the Interoperability Showcase at HIMSS, or as presentations in the HL7 Booth, or even presentations in our own booth.

Some of the stuff I worked on over the last year includes:

• CDA Consolidation Guide - This HL7 Implementation guide takes work that I've been involved with in three different organizations over a five year period spread across dozens of documents and puts it all together in one place, and starts to make it computable.  You can get the HL7 Trifolia Workbench with the Consolidation Project data entered from HL7 here.
• Much of the work I did in the ONC S&I Framework project for Transitions of Care earlier this year revolved around the CDA Consolidation guide, and the previous HITSP C83 and IHE PCC Technical Framework efforts. 
• The IHE PCC Reconciliation profile, while not on display here, addresses issues about how to record reconciliation of problems, medications and allergies.
• The IHE ITI XDS Document Workflow profile which will be discussed at the showcase.  This promises to simplify the automation and tracking of the various workflows that providers implement across multiple organizations to provide patient-centered, accountable care.

At the same time, many new things that I'm also working on this year will be discussed, and even shown at the show:

• The most obvious of these are the Query Health Demonstrations on Wednesday and Thursday.  We get to compete with CMS and ONC discussing (we hope) Meaningful Use Stage 2 on Wednesday morning, but I hope some of you will show up anyway, and if you miss it then, come see us at the Interoperability Showcase on Thursday morning.  Query Health marks a pretty significant transition point for me, as my focus on standards moves away from CDA and towards HQMF.  I suspect that I'll be spending significant amounts of my time in standards focusing on quality measurement and clinical decision support as a result of it.
• As I said, HQMF is going to be important, and I'll be spending a good deal of time in the coming months working on that, and also on QRDA.  I've written so much lately on HQMF that I suspect you are probably tired of hearing about it.  QRDA is another third of that picture (and it would take a whole blog post to explain about the missing third, which I'll likely write AFTER HIMSS).
• The IHE Request for Clinical Knowledge profile takes over where HITSP left off with T81.  IT's essentially a new revision of the HITSP work.  One of my colleagues will be showing what we've done with T81 with the CDC at a customer site Tuesday afternoon in the Interoperability Showcase, and I'll be talking ever so briefly about how this is influencing the work on this new IHE Profile that takes advantage of the HL7 InfoButton standard.
• Workflow, Workflow, Workflow.  That pretty much describes the rest of IHE PCC's work for the year, with new profiles on Referral, Remote Monitoring and Tumor Boards being developed over the course of this year.  Our transition into workflow has expanded the reach of the IHE PCC domain into Italy, the Netherlands and other parts of Europe, with much of the work being driven in these areas from outside the US.  It only makes sense, because these countries have a much longer history with Health Information Exchange, and are more ready for this logical next step.
• CDA Release 3 continues to grab some of my attention, and I expect that I'll be more involved as it get's closer to being ready for it's first ballot, which will almost certainly happen this year

And of course, there's the ever looming Meaningful Use rules, which we hear should be available Tuesday (hopefully in the morning).  While I haven't been responsible for either the legislation or the regulation, clearly the work that I've been involved with in HL7, IHE and the ONC S&I Framework has had some small influence in the Standards and Certification rule.  I look forward (along with all the rest of you) to see how they turn out.