ONC Standards and Interoperability Framework CDA Implementation Guide Consolidation Project

I blogged about this project earlier.

http://jira.siframework.org/wiki/display/SIF/CDA+Consolidation+Project

Basically, this is a project that is sponsored by the Office of National Coordinator for Health Care IT (ONC) to consolidate and harmonize eight of the CDA IGs that are required for Meaningful Use. I am participatign in my role as the Publishing Facilitator for the HL7 Structured Documents Work Group, which owns the IGs and will be the sponsoring committee when the documents are ballotted in HL7.

Some very smart people have developed tools that will enable us to create a single library of CDA Templates and constraints and publish the IGs

The Model Driven Health Tools (MDHT) from the Open Health Tools (OHT) project will be used to generate the IGS. MDHT is based on the Eclipse workbench. The actual prose for the IGs will be created using the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). The tools will transform the models and DITA into a variety of output formats.

https://www.projects.openhealthtools.org/sf/projects/mdht/

http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.2/os/spec/DITA1.2-spec.html#ditaspec

I've seen Eclipse before, but this is my first exposure to MDHT and DITA. I think that I understand how the tool integrates the modelling and vocabulary information with the publishing aspect, but I am still learning.

The main group has been meeting since the first week of January. The publishing sub-group will begin meeting next week.

The intent is to ballot these IGs in the May HL7 ballot cycle, so we have a lot to accomplish in a very short period of time. We will also explore how we can better integrate the IG generation and publication process into the HL7 Publishing process. It would be good if all of the CDA IGs can be generated using these tools. This would enable consistent formatting.

There are two other S&I Framework projects that will kickoff next week. These are the Transition of Care (TOC) Initiative and and the Laboratory Interface Initiative. I do not have time to participate in either of those. I'll be busy enough with my day job and the CDA IG Consolidation project.