Happy Birthday to The SANER Project

Three days ago was the one-year anniversary of the public inception of The SANER Project. It's hard for me to believe how far we've come.  The project is still going strong, but we are now in the "uninteresting" stages of development.  We've identified what we need to do with all of the HL7 Ballot comments, and now are starting the task of making the edits in order to publish as a Standard for Trial Use.  I expect we have another month of work to get that done.  The next step gets more interesting, as we move past proof-of-concept testing and into deployment in pilots.

Connectathon participation is a routine part of our development efforts, and we've been planning for the next HL7 Connectathon, having recently completed participation in the IHE North American Connectathon.  In May, we anticipate being able to provide a month of sample test data to enable testing of actors at real-world volumes for an entire county's worth of hospitals.

Major EHR vendors Epic and Cerner participated in the last testing event, as did others, including the CDC.  SANER has gotten attention from several public health agencies or health information exchanges in several states, including Texas, where I am supporting efforts in an ONC STAR HIE Grant, and in Arizona where another Keith is driving the efforts in IHE.

The Arizona interest in the FHIR SANER IG showed up in my inbox the other day.  If someone were to tell you that a guy named Keith working for an HIE proposed an IHE White Paper to the Quality, Research and Public Health workgroup using the SANER IG, you wouldn't be surprised.  But as soon as you found at that it wasn't me, you might be (it was another Keith).  So, it's worthy of note.  I had nothing to do with the proposal, but you can certainly bet I'll be involved in the effort.

Next week (tentatively), my colleague Lauren Kneiser and I will be presenting on SANER to HITAC. That's a pretty significant milestone from my perspective. We're also presenting a recorded session available on demand for the Preparedness Summit in April, something like the fifth or six presentation we've given at a national event.

The work of The SANER Project continues, and what I've learned from this project is influencing additional standards development in HL7.  The biggest thing I've learned from SANER is that NOT every thing done with FHIR needs a profile.  Some things simply need a framework for people to describe (in FHIR), the data that they want, so that systems can collect and find it.

     Keith