2011 Year End Summary

It has been an eventful year.

In January I began working with the ONC S&I Framework on the Consolidated CDA Guide. I was a co-chair of the Documentation workgroup. The Consolidated Guide was published in December 2011 and I am listed as a co-editor. This IG should be one of the base standards for Meaningful Use Stage 2, and I am honored to have contributed, however slightly, to this effort.

I attended the two ONC S&I Framework Face to Face Meetings in Washington, DC.

I changed jobs in May. I am now a Healthcare Solutions Architect for Covisint.

I worked on a state-wide HIE project, HealthShare Montana. I also work on a Michigan based ACO. I have worked on some internal projects, and will be leading an effort to deploy a terminology service to translate local terminology to standard codes before we store this data. I am also leading an effort to deploy messaging implementation guides and computable artifacts to simplify our process for on-boarding new trading partners.

I am company "standards guy", so I participate in the ONC S&I Framework, HL7, IHE and a few other initiatives.

I decided to become more sociable this year, so I joined twitter (@PeterNGilbert) and facebook.

I was recognized as one of the top contributers to the HIT Social Media conversation (#HITsm).

http://www.hl7standards.com/blog/2011/12/20/2011-top-hitsm-contributors/

Looking forward to 2012:

We expect to do work for an existing state-wide HIE in 2012 helping them to on-board their backlog of hospitals and provider offices. This project, alone, should keep me very busy in 2012.

I will be attending the HL7 Working Group Meeting in San Antonio in January. I will see if I can get to the two other WGMs.

I don't know if I will be going to HIMSS in February.

2011 was a good year, and 2012 should be even better.

2011 TOP #HITSM CONTRIBUTORS

I am honored to be on this list, but I feel a bit like Groucho Marx: "I wouldn't join any club that would have me as a member." :-)

The HITsm tweet chats are an interesting place where a bunch of us that are passionate about using Health Information Technology (HIT) to improve patient care get together to exchange ideas. The chats will resume on Fridays at noon eastern in 2012.

Here is a link to the story. http://www.hl7standards.com/blog/2011/12/20/2011-top-hitsm-contributors/

Terminology Management

Up to now, my company has performed Terminology Management using translate tables in each application. This kind of sort of works, but is cumbersome and prone to error. DocSite has a translate table for each practice, so the code mapping needs to be done over for each practice. Mirth, our CDR, has translate tables for each data source, and so the crossmaps have to be set up for each data source. Also, Mirth will not perform Standard-to-Standard code mapping, so if the code comes in in CPT, Mirth will not translate it to LOINC, for example.

I have a new project coming up where we will have perform code translation as the messages pass through our interface engine, because we will be recieving messages from trading partners (hospitals and clinics) and delivering them to a state-wide Health Information Exchange (HIE).

So, we will use Apelon's Distributed Terminology Service (DTS) and will work with Apelon to create cross maps from local lab codes to LOINC. We will then call DTS from within our interface engine to translate the codes before sending them to the HIE's component systems.

We will also use DTS to perform code set validation. For example, we will have the engine call DTS to ensure that we are actually getting a LOINC code in the field that we are expecting to receive a LOINC code.

I've done code mapping at a couple of previous jobs, so this is a process that I am familiar with. This will be Covisint's first foray into this technology, so it should be fun.

The other thing that should be fascinating is that we will be on-boarding approximately one hundred hospitals and approximately one thousand physician offices for this project. I should be very busy.