hl7 news from FierceHealthIT

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) is pushing hard for universal adoption of standards that will increase the interoperability of health IT applications, according to Doug Read more...

Orion Health, a developer of health information exchanges, and Health Language Inc., which specializes in mapping the myriad medical terms for the same concepts to a single terminology, have joined Read more...

Thanks to the stimulus bill, health IT implementations are going forward at a rapid pace. There's no way that the industry can produce enough healthcare-specific experts to run all of these projects, Read more...

> The Medical Group Management Association is calling for the use of standardized, machine-readable patient ID cards by Jan. 1, 2010, arguing that the cards can strip $1 billion in cost from the Read more...

A group of participants cutting across the employer, IT vendor and healthcare provider sectors announced last week that they'd come together to create a shared framework for health information Read more...

> Industry standards group HL7 is asking for public comments on a potential standard for PHR functionality. Article > Microsoft's Read more...

> Critics continue to argue that a nationwide EMR system could pose serious privacy risks. Article

> Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts has kicked off an effort under which it will analyze patient records to see which doctors meet clinical guidelines. …

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While standards will always be with us, sometimes one or two break out from the pack and gain more widespread support. Of late this seems to be the case with two, the Continuity of Care Record and the PDF-H. The CCR standard, an XML-based set of data used when patients move from one care setting to another, is being used for a growing number of RHIO efforts. At the same time, a more secure, healthcare-oriented version of the familiar PDF format, known as PDF-H, is also drawing attention. …

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University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, like virtually all of its peers, was eager to create an interoperable infrastructure linking up all patient care information. The project was huge. UPMC is an integrated health system with 19 hospitals, almost 5,000 physicians and nearly 400 outpatient sites. These various sites were supported by a patchwork of EMRs and other clinical systems, which, though best of breed, didn't communicate with each other. At first, the health system build more …

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