FHIR and the Future of Interoperability

There is growing interest in the health care information technology community in an emerging data exchange technology known as FHIR (pronounced “fire”). Last year we held a webinar on the topic with Dr. John Halamka, CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center; Keith Boone, Standards Geek at GE Healthcare; Janet Campbell, Software Developer at Epic; and Arien Malec, VP, Data Platform and Acquisition Tools at RelayHealth. Now I am following up with another great webinar (register for free HERE) with a great panel including Dr. Michael Hodgkins, CMIO of American Medical Association (AMA); Dr. Doug Fridsma, MD, CEO American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA); Dr. Charles Jaffe, CEO Health Level Seven (HL7); Jeffery Smith, Senior Director of Federal Affairs, College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME); and Mario Hyland, Senior Vice President AEGIS.net, Inc. You won't want to miss this...

CONNECT Release 2.4

Thursday, March 25 there was a webinar on the newest version of CONNECT, an open source software and community that promotes IT interoperability in the healthcare system. CONNECT uses Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) standards and governance to make sure that health information exchanges are compatible with other exchanges being set up throughout the country. The webinar reviewed changes made to CONNECT as part of the 2.4 release. Presentation topics included:

• XDR Push Spec: The purpose of this specification is to provide the ability to "push" data for a given patient from one NHIE to another via configuration on the submission side. This is a different model of exchange than subscription because the sender decides who the data should go to and the receiver receives data on an appropriate available endpoint from the sources it authorizes.
• Support for UDDI (Service Registry) spec enhancements
• Subscriptions/Notifications; Secure Communications; Query by State; x.509 Certs
• Support for CRL (Certificate Revocation Lists) CA (Certificate Authority)
• Integrated Dynamic Document Assembly Components
• Universal Client support for Patient Discovery
• Authorization Framework enhancements: Support for two new SAML assertion fields
• Address Memory Consumption and Long Build Times
• Progress towards IDE Neutral Build Scripts

CONNECT Release 2.4 includes the initial trial implementation of a new NHIN service, Document Submission, which implements a push exchange pattern. Changes to the CONNECT architecture reflected in this Software Architecture Documentation are limited to minor revisions to include new Document Submission service. There are no other architectural changes.

The slides from the webinar are below and the audio will be posted: