BizTalk, HL7

Eric Stott, a well known BizTalk and HL7, EDI expert who I have the pleasure to work with currently in a health information exchange initiative, has a new website:

hl7-info.com – General HL7 issues, debugging HL7 messages and how BizTalk interacts with the messages
biztalk-info.com – general BizTalk issues, HIPAA related issues

HL7 v3 sample Code from Microsoft

My complaint has always been the lack of available open source code for HL7 v3. Microsoft has been great in recent years by releasing sample .NET code such as the "Application Blocks" (see for example) and various reference architectures. They have now released code for a working sample HL7 v3 application using BizTalk. I'm not really crazy about the undue complexity in implementing HL7 v3, but I hope Microsoft can make it more practical to implement using their platforms such as BizTalk.

Go take a look at Roberto Ruggeri's blog item: Getting Started with HL7 Version 3 and BizTalk Server 2006 (R2) for more information.

Here is the link to the sample code. Here is the whitepaper on getting started with BizTalk and HL7 v3.

We just presented at Microsoft MSHUG Tech Conference

We just presented our RHIO project, semrhio.org at MS-HUG, the Microsoft Healthcare Users group Tech Conference in Redmond. Our topic was "Winning Trust and Minimizing IT Resources".

Roberto Ruggeri , a Senior Technical Strategist with Microsoft Worldwide Health gave a review of our presentation on his blog. Roberto was very helpful and we would like to give him our thanks

Eric Stott, our "famous" BizTalk architect, was with us and commented on his blog. Byron Byfield, a fine specialist in healthcare payor-side data analytics, promises he will have something to say soon on his new blog.

I was joined in the presentation by Kate Sullivan, who provided an excellent background on SEMRHIO and the current RHIO climate.

The topic was on how choosing the "right" Trust model for data sharing and minimizing IT resources by centralizing common services, there is a greater chance for getting buy-in from competing community hospitals to join to form a RHIO, since the two main barriers to forming a RHIO, trust and IT infrastructure can be overcome to a large degree.

Typically, cost and security issues end up being why many RHIO fail to go beyond the planning phase. In fact, several RHIOs, after spending anywhere from $500,000 to a few million, end up closing their operations. A few weeks ago, the Portland RHIO, and a few months ago, the very high profile Sanata Barabara RHIO.