Machine readable data is what we want to exchange in HealthIT. More standards need to have good machine readable data underneath them. I need more better data.
One of my work items after the HL7 WGM was to see about kick-starting a bunch of FHIR resources. I looked at CCDA and CCD but couldn't easily extract the information that I wanted out of the data. There weren't easily accessible business names or definitions (even in the Trifolia database).
But I did have a source which I could use which provided business names and definitions. I pulled up original versions of HITSP C154, C83 and C80 that I had, saved as Filtered HTML, converted (using tidy) to XHTML, and then extracted the entry data and associated data element definitions, and merged data element definitions with entry structures. I performed data extraction using XSLT and my knowledge of the very regularly structured table formats to get to the most useful stuff (I could have gotten to a lot more)
So now I have 20 or so resources that I'm hoping to be able to use to kick start some discussions on FHIR.
Have you considered vCard:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc6350.txt
They have been working on the semantics of people/orgs for a long time...
And would be consistent with FIHR's desire to be more web ready...
Keith, This is an intriguing list and concept. I interpret these FHIR standards as an 80/20 list of interoperability standards that an organization COULD start to implement rapidly to exchange data that is 1) clearly defined and specified and 2) high value. Is that correct?
ReplyDeleteCould you provide a short, non-technical, plain English explanation of what these standards are and what they might accomplish?