PHR Standards

FierceHealthIT had an interesting link to an article on PHR standards development:
Health insurers, HL7 team to create portable PHRs

Its nice to hear that HL7 is developing a PHR standard, however, I wonder if companies like Microsoft (see HealthVault) will the ones to create a de-facto, practical PHR standard that one can actually implement using existing tool sets. From my own experience with HL7 v3, I don't have much confidence that standards committees can put together something that is practical in implementation. See my previous post on HL7 v3 implementation.

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

Office Open XML for Healthcare

Roberto Ruggeri posted the following on his blog:
Using Office Open XML Formats to Support Electronic Health Records Portability and Health Industry Standards

It includes sample code
Here is a description taken from the site:

"Empowering patients and consumers to securely exchange Electronic Health Records is a big debate in the Health industry across the globe. In this article, we discuss some techniques that use Office Open XML Formats and how to embed custom XML formats to exchange data securely. This particular scenario shows the use of Health Level Seven (HL7) Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) to represent the Electronic Health Record in an industry standard format. It also shows how to include the data in a secured document, based on Office Open XML Formats, for portability across multiple care providers."

HL7 Resources

I thought it would be a good idea to put information and links to HL7 resources for those of us who live and breath HL7.

BizTalk, HL7 :
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 Tools:
This company has a suite of other HL7 tools, take a look: Easy HL7
They have a product, HL7 Viewer which seems to be a fairly inexpensive HL7 viewer. It would be useful in examining the contents of HL7 v2x data.

Website with a List of HL7 Tools
This blog has a very extensive list of resources.

NeoTools has many HL7 resources.
The HL7 Evolution
HL7 Browsing Product
NeoIntegrate Interface Engine
HL7 Blog A great way to learn and improve your HL7 knowledgebase.

Microsoft HL7
HL7 v2 Developers Guide
Health Connection Engine (not an HL7 resource strictly-speaking, but is an open source project for a healthcare specific "Enterprise Service Bus". This has relevance for those interested in developing a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) for their healthcare IT infrastructure.

HL7 Tools & Resources Page
Introduction
HL7 tools

Mapping Lab Values to normalized codes