IHE Liaison Report to HL7

I'm the HL7 Liaison to IHE, which means that every four months I get to report to the HL7 Technical Steering Committee what IHE is doing that could impact HL7 standards.  The report is due today, and I also need a blog post, so I'm killing two birds with one stone.

NOTE:  This is not a complete listing of IHE Domain activities, just those using or having an impact on HL7 Standards.  This is also not a complete history, just a list of recent activities since the last time I gave this update to HL7.

Patient Care Coordination

• PCC is using the HL7 Infobutton Standard and the URL Implementation Guide to update the HITSP T81 Retrieval of Medical Knowledge transaction to support IHE requirements.  It uses the Atom format as the standard for responses, similar to what HL7 did with Infobutton DSS Implementation Guide.   To be published for public comment in early June.
• PCC is also developing three workflow profiles based on the IHE XDW profile to support eReferral, Telehome Monitoring, and Tumor Board which are not presently using HL7 standards.

IT Infrastructure

• ITI is developing a white paper on the exchange of Critical Results, with the anticipation of future profile development.  They are looking at HL7 Version 2.5, 2.7.1 or 2.8, and adopting (or pre-adopting) the R40, R41, R42 trigger events with the ORU to communicate critical findings.
• ITI is also developing a profile to support Patient Encounter Location Query, using HL7 Version 2.  Development is principally being handled through IHE-J.
• It is also developing a profile supporting the exchange of documents for mobile health, and has been looking at hData and other standards to support communication of clinical documents (e.g., CDA) between mobile devices and application portals.   To be published for public comment in early June

Quality, Research and Public Health

• QRPH is working on several CDA templates in support of Early Hearing Screening, Birth Summaries,  and Clinical Research.

Cardiology

• IHE Cardiology has developed CDA templates for Catheterization (CATH), 
• The are presently working on a profile supporting Electrophysiology reporting using CDA.

Eyecare

• Eyecare has developed General Eye Evaluation Content Profile, using an HL7 CDA document to record a patient’s general eye examination. It consists of an evaluation of the physiological function and the anatomical status of the eye, visual system and its related structures. Planned to be released as a Draft for Trial Implementation in May.
• They are currently developing three clincial documents related to Cataract Sugeries. Cataract Pre-Operative Note, Cataract Operative Note and Cataract Post-Operative Note. Expected to be published for pubic comment late in 2012.
  

Radiology 

• Radiology is developing a white paper on the management of reporting templates.  While this does not reference HL7 standards, it does address a topic of interest to Structured Documents with respect to the "Definition" of a document.

Laboratory

• The Laboratory Analytical Workflow (LAW) profile improves interoperability between in vitro diagnostic testing systems and health informatics systems by reducing complexity and variability in the exchange of information related to patient and QC test orders and to the result thereof. LAW supports the workflow of lab test work order steps and their results between analyzers and automation managers. LAW will be tested at the 2012 EU Connectathon.  It uses HL7 2.5.1.
• The Laboratory Clinical Communications (LCC) profile is to standardize and electronically capture common laboratory – provider communications around order modifications and result verification and interpretation. LCC is in progress.   It uses HL7 2.5.1.

Patient Care Devices

• Asynchronous Data Query (ADQ) is a profiling project within the IHE Patient Care Device domain to provide messages for a system to request device data from a repository containing device data. An HL7 query is used to specify the particular data that is desired.