Meeting of Major Healthcare IT Standards Groups Sets New Initiative in Motion

Business Wire
May 26, 2004

NEEDHAM, Mass. --The Object Management Group(TM) (OMG(TM)) announces a new initiative amongst members of OMG, HL7, NCPDP, X12 and representatives from MedicAlert Foundation, Express Scripts and PatientKeeper, after the groups came together for a meeting last month in St. Louis that examined the role of modeling and interoperability in the healthcare industry. The new initiative, "Exploring Interoperability Requirements in Healthcare," will resume at a meeting to establish a working roadmap for future standards as well as a re-launch of OMG's Healthcare Domain Task Force on Thursday, June 24, 2004 in Orlando , FL.

At this time, healthcare IT companies who are concerned with the importance of interoperability requirements, are urged to get in on the ground floor of this remarkable opportunity for involvement. To participate in the launch of this initiative, an email list has been made public: healthcare@omg.org. To add a name, contact, referral or customer, send the request to OMG Vice President of Business Development, Nicole Glazen Rikkinen at nicole@omg.org.

At the meeting in St. Louis , each standards body and end-user community representative had the opportunity to voice their approaches to healthcare interoperability and pertinent areas that demand standardization. Key discussions focused on electronic healthcare standards, electronic drug prescribing, patient record infrastructure, OMG Model Driven Architecture(R) (MDA(R)) and its potential role in healthcare standardization, as well as business perspectives and standardization in the global market. For a complete summary of the meeting presentations, visit http://www.omg.org/news/meetings/tc/special_events.htm.

"MedicAlert is very encouraged by the outcome and direction of the St. Louis session. We had a productive exchange about the key issues that surround the question of what exactly is a Patient-Centered Electronic Health Record," said David Harrington, CTO of the MedicAlert(R) Foundation. "While there are many views and many different requirements, the common understanding that is emerging holds that the EHR contains information provided primarily from many health-related encounters, and that the connectivity engine is the central concept of any solution. It also includes the ability for all participating entities to identify and authenticate appropriate requests for information, and ensures that existing departmental and other legacy systems do not have to be replaced. Most importantly this process recognizes that essential to the successful implementation and deployment of any solution, is a well-defined set of services and interfaces for interoperability between these systems. We look forward to the continuation of these working sessions in June at the OMG Technical Meeting in Orlando ."

Richard Soley, OMG Chairman and CEO added that, "Participation by all healthcare IT standards groups is key to moving forward with this exciting initiative. For instance, it is HL7's leadership in defining a Reference Model for healthcare, leveraging OMG's established Unified Modeling Language(TM) and ensuring suitability for implementation on any platform that will help drive a much needed standardized approach to Electronic Health Records."

Background

Past work through OMG's Healthcare Domain Task Force resulted in the adoption of four specifications between 1996 and 2001. The four specifications are: The Person Identification Service (PIDS), which defines a set of interfaces to an interchangeable set of services that provide a best match or ordered list of best matches to possibly incomplete or conflicting data about a person. The Resource Access Decision (RAD) Facility, which provides fine-grained access decisions to security-aware data and applications, and administration for the policies that define the decisions. The Clinical Observations Access Service (COAS), which standardizes access to clinical observations in multiple formats including numerical data stored by instruments or entered from observation; images; and transcribed notes. The Lexicon Query Service (LQS), which standardizes a set of read-only interfaces able to access medical terminology system definitions ranging from sets of codes to complex, hierarchical classification and categorization schemes.