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• MS-HUG TechForum 2008 - Call for Proposals

  We just close the curtain on the summer TechForum and it's already time to start planning for the next one. HIMSS just issued the call for proposals for the 2008 TechForum happening in conjunction with HIMSS in Orlando, FL Call for Proposals Now Open! MS-HUG Tech Forum 2008 — Orlando, FL Orange County Convention Center Sunday, February 24, 2008 Interested in presenting at MS-HUG Tech Forum 2008 in Orlando, FL during the HIMSS Annual Conference at the Orange County Convention Center? The Call for Proposal process for the next Tech Forum event is now open! Please complete the online application by midnight CDT, October 7, 2007 to be considered as a possible presenter for this event. MS-HUG is looking for users of Microsoft-based technology to join the experts at Microsoft on the agenda for this must-see event! This Forum focuses on leading users of Microsoft technology sharing their insights and providing practical strategies on how they apply to the healthcare environment. Following is a list of topics that MS-HUG is considering for the Tech Forum. Please note, presentations must be focused on a Microsoft based technology or solution. The list is provided for your reference and is not inclusive of all topics under consideration. Please feel free to submit something that is relevant but outside of the scope of topics listed. Emerging Technologies Health Data, Interoperability and Standards IT Infrastructure and Architecture Mobility and Wireless Patient Safety Process Improvement Business Intelligence services for providers, payers, and consumers. Don’t miss this great opportunity to share your experience and expertise with your peers by submitting a proposal today! As a speaker, your registration for the Tech Forum event is complimentary. We will not provide travel. You will be notified of the status of your Proposal by October 30, 2007. Posted Friday, September 14, 2007 1:12 PM from The Healthcare IT Blog | 0 Comments Filed under: Events, MS-HUG

• MS-HUG TechForum - Recap

  I like the TechForum. It's a good opportunity for me to catch up with friends like John Koisch, Tom Canter, Simon Chester and Eric Stott and learn about the cool things that partners and customers are doing with our technology. It's great to see that the community of MS-HUG bloggers is growing: Eric Stott posted a summary of day 1 and day 2 of the event Simon Chester has comments on MS-HUG, the MS CUI and the Accelerator for HL7 Matthias Shapiro has comments on MS-HUG and the MS CUI. Mark Singh has some comments about his session. Did I miss anyone? The Summer TechForum has just passed, but the wheels are already in motion for the next one that will be in Orlando, FL in conjunction with the 2008 HIMSS Conference. Here is a recap of all my entries on the TechForum: Kicking off MS-HUG TechForum MS-HUG TechForum - Lessons Learned in Forming a RHIO MS-HUG TechForum - IHE XDS.b Reference Implementation MS-HUG TechForum - Microsoft Health Common User Interface (MSCUI) MS-HUG TechForum - BizTalk Accelerator for HL7 [Update 1] MS-HUG TechForum - Day 2 MS-HUG TechForum - Azyxxi See you at the next MS-HUG TechForum! Posted Friday, August 24, 2007 1:11 PM from The Healthcare IT Blog | 0 Comments Filed under: Events, MS-HUG

• MS-HUG TechForum - Azyxxi

  The closing keynote for MS-HUG was delivered by Davide Viganò, General Manager in the Health Solutions Group (HSG). Davide, to which I partly owe my move from Microsoft Italy to Corp in 2000, is a long time Microsoftie and has worked in healthcare in the past. He gave a little retrospective going back to the first MS-HUG meeting in 1995 which at that time was owned by Microsoft. Davide talked briefly about the consumer aspects of what HSG is doing and then went into more details on the Enterprise platform and Azyxxi. Even though I have been working with HSG for the past couple of years and know a lot about Azyxxi, this was the first time I have a seen a live demo. Meera Kanhouwa, Physician Executive with HSG, did a great job in demonstrating Azyxxi and its ability to allow the clinician to access *all* the information about their patient in a blink of an eye. Unfortunately, being the last session of the event, many people had left but we still managed to gather a good crowd and have a very lively Q&A session. Posted Friday, August 24, 2007 12:40 PM from The Healthcare IT Blog | 0 Comments Filed under: Azyxxi, Events, MS-HUG

• MS-HUG TechForum - Day 2

  Here is a quick summary of the sessions I attended today. Clinical Messaging in a Services Oriented Architecture The two Bob (Bob Long and Bob Gill) from Visiphor gave a presentation on the status of adoption of services across a number of projects with focus on something that is happening in Canada with Canada Health Infoway and the Health Information Access Layer (HIAL). They spent some time talking about how they leverage the ESB Guidance to implement the regional hub for the Provincial Health Authorities in Canada. It's good to see the work that Visiphor has done in aligning their message to the Connected Health Framework - Architecture and Design Blueprint, this is exactly what we were thinking when we started working on the CHF a couple of years ago. The presentation is on the MS-HUG TechForum web site. Service Standards in Healthcare Colleague, fellow standards developer and good friend John Koisch gave a very interesting and elaborate presentation of the status of adoption of SOA in the industry and the difficulties associated to adopting services in Health IT. As a member of the Health Services Specification Project (HSSP) within HL7, John also talked about the work that HL7 is doing to address that issue. During the Q&A session an interesting question came up about the relation between the Connected Health Framework - Architecture and Design Blueprint and the HSSP work. While the two initiatives are pretty much proceeding in parallel, they are definitely based on the same principles and people adopting the CHF guidance will be in a good position to take advantage of the work done by HL7. The presentation is on the MS-HUG TechForum web site. Sepsis Screening Tool This was a very cool session in that it addresses a big issue for hospitals worldwide: fighting sepsis. I learned a lot of interesting statistics like the fact that death from sepsis ranks 10th among causes of death and that sepsis kills about 1,400 people a day worldwide. This is a great case where applying technology (in small amounts) can solve some real problems and have immediate return on investment by improving patient safety and saving money to the hospitals. I strongly suggest having a look at the presentation and what our partner Accent on Integration is doing. Healthcare Enterprise Business Intelligence and Care Management If are planning to do any BI work with your clinical data, definitely check out what Whole Health did. The project is very interesting and the only downside is that it is not currently available as an offering for someone to buy :-) but I can see how they can use the insight as a competitive advantage. The aspect that interests me the most out of this project is the use of the HL7 Version 3.0 Reference Information Model (RIM) as a schema for the datawarehouse. As I say when teaching the Implementation Tutorial for HL7 V3 at the HL7 Working Group Meetings, there is a ton of value in the RIM and it is definitely a good thing to use it as the basis for these kinds of things. As usual there will be cases where the RIM does not model concepts that you have to deal with, so be prepared to "embrace and extend". This project was not exception to that. Now off to the Azyxxi presentation... Posted Wednesday, August 22, 2007 6:21 PM from The Healthcare IT Blog | 0 Comments Filed under: Events, MS-HUG

• MS-HUG TechForum - BizTalk Accelerator for HL7

  Straight from the horse's mouth, Stuart Landrum, Program Manager for the BizTalk Accelerators gave an overview of the new features for the Accelerator for HL7 2.0(A4HL7) in BizTalk 2006 R2. Here they are: New Accelerator Licensing! Support for HL7 v2.5 Support of international characters Support for ordered messaging Enhanced MLLP persistent connection management HL7 Schema Generation Tool BizTalk Mapper behavior enhancements: HL7 v2: Preserving the Order When Mapping a Repeating Sequence Group HL7 v3: Accommodating Schemas with Large Footprints Licensing A little piece of information that might have gone unnoticed is that with the R2 release of BizTalk, all the Accelerators (HL7, HIPAA, Swift, RosettaNet) are going to be free and included in the box! Yes, read again, free. This added to the new licensing models for partners makes the adoption of BizTalk a no-brainer. Support for HL7 v2.5 We have included support for v2.5 of the HL7 Messaging standard. Support for v2.5.1 that just came out of HL7 is not included as it did not make the cut in time. For people in a hurry to implement 2.5.1 there is still hope, keep reading. International Characters In version 2.0 of the A4HL7 we have extended support for international characters: 8859/1, 8859/2, 8859/3, 8859/4, 8859/5, 8859/6, 8859/7, 8859/8, 8859/9, ASCII and UNICODE (single, double, and 3-byte UNICODE character sets)except for JAS2020 and JIS X 0202 which are Japanese character sets with non-standard UNICODE encoding. Support for Ordered Messaging We have extended the support for ordered messaging already present in BizTalk 2006 to the MLLP adapter in v2.0 of the A4HL7. In addition to this support we are also releasing a whitepaper for more complex scenarios based on the concept of Ticket Dispenser and Gatekeeper. Enhanced MLLP Connection Management One of the funny things about MLLP is that it is sooo simple, yet pretty much everyone out there has a different take on how it should be implemented. We have added functionality to more finely tune how connection management is handled in MLLP. HL7 Schema Generation Tool I have talked about this before and there is not a lot to add. The tool allows you to implement versions of HL7 v2.x that we have not included in the box (hint, hint) by working directly with the models that are stored in the Microsoft Access database that is published by HL7. BizTalk Mapper Enhancements In order to address the issues with mapping HL7 v2 messages we have added a flag to the map file that will add additional logic to the XSLT generated by the Mapper to prevent the order of the HL7 segments from changing. The other couple of issues that we addressed with the Mapper are more related to HL7 Version 3 and deal with the complexities of those schemas. For full details on the changes have a look at Stuart's presentation on my SkyDrive: Note: for details on how to get XPS working on your system, check my previous post. Posted Wednesday, August 22, 2007 12:54 PM from The Healthcare IT Blog | 0 Comments Filed under: BizTalk, Events, Healthcare Integration, HL7, HL7v2, MS-HUG

• MS-HUG TechForum - Microsoft Health Common User Interface (MSCUI)

  Andrew Kirby presented on the Microsoft Health Common User Interface (MSCUI), a project born out of the collaboration with the England National Health Service (NHS). This is something that we have been talking about for a long time, but are now finally to the point where everybody can look at the Design Guidance, the Toolkit for Visual Studio and the .NET Framework and the source code for the controls. Bill Crounse posted an overview of the project on his HealthBlog. The best way to experience the tools and understanding what's there is to have a look at the mscui.net web site and look at the demonstrators that we posted on Monday of this week. Let us know what you think! Posted Tuesday, August 21, 2007 6:36 PM from The Healthcare IT Blog | 0 Comments Filed under: Events, MSCUI, MS-HUG

• MS-HUG TechForum - IHE XDS.b Reference Implementation

  We had a fairly well attended session and the objective of providing an overview of the Health Connection Engine (HCE) and IHE XDS.b reference implementations was achieved, although with the time we had I could not get into a lot of detail. We have talked about the HCE in the past so I'll try to focus on the IHE aspect in this post. Background on IHE and XDS Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) is an organization operating in the Health Information and Communication Technology area. The main purpose of IHE is to create Interoperability Profiles that simplify integration scenarios in healthcare. The IHE profiles are grouped in Technical Frameworks that address the business scenarios and the transactions that are used to implement those scenarios. Most of the times IHE ends up profiling the use existing standards such as HL7, DICOM, Web Services and so on. The final product, the Integration Profile, tells implementers of IHE-compliant solutions how to use those standards to allow for better interoperability. IHE started working in the IT Infrastructure domain about 4 years ago and taking on challenges of how to do Patient Identity Cross-Referencing (PIX), Enterprise User Authentication (EUA), Patient Demographic Query (PDQ) and many other. Arguably one of the most successful IHE profiles is Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing or XDS. The profile focuses of the publication, storage and retrieval of documents for the purpose of exchange within a network of trusted participants (Affinity Domain). One of the issues that came up with XDS as the underlying standards evolved was to keep it updated to the current ones to allow for a simpler implementation and maintainability. For this purpose IHE decided to release a new version of the IHE XDS called XDS.b. I have been working with IHE since November of 2006 to release this new version of XDS and I am the author and editor of that Integration Profile. IHE XDS.b was released for trial implementation in August 2007 and will be tested at the 2008 IHE Connect-a-thon and demonstrated at the 2008 HIMSS Interoperability Showcase in Orlando, FL. If everything works out, IHE XDS.b will be released in June 2008 and integrated within the IHE IT Infrastructure Technical Framework. IHE XDS.b Integration Profile XDS.b was designed with a strong focus on interoperability and co-existence with XDS.a, minimizing where possible the changes that people implementing XDS.a had to go through if they decided to move to XDS.b For that reason, XDS.a and XDS.b can co-exist, although some level of translation needs to happen. XDS.b implements the same business scenario as XDS.a, only the technical implementation is different. On the implementation of the business scenario and the transactions we have a number of changes: All transactions reference ebXML Registry Information Model 3.0 All transactions require SOAP 1.2 Optionally support SOAP 1.1 All transactions require WS-Addressing All transactions have WSDL defined IHE ITI Technical Framework Volume 2, Appendix V: one WSDL per Actor per Integration Profile MTOM is required for attachments Document content is within the s:Body in an element of type xs:base64Binary for MTOM support IHE has dropped support for the not-widely-used "off-line" mode while we work on a a-synchronous web services paradigm. IHE also updated XDS.b to allow for both HL7v2 and HL7v3 Patient Identity Feeds. This option makes sense for environments where one of the HL7 messaging standards is prominent with respect to the other. More details on what's new in XDS.b compared to XDS.a is available on the deck posted on SkyDrive: For more information on how to get XPS to work on your machine, check my previous post. IHE XDS.b Reference Implementation Most of the available implementations of the IHE XDS.a (the current XDS profile) were built on the Java platform. We decided, based on the feedback from customers and partners, to work on a reference implementation for the new XDS.b profile on the Microsoft platform. As part of this process we will be taking this reference implementation to the 2008 IHE Connect-a-thon and test it for interoperability with other XDS.b implementations to make sure that the profile is implemented correctly. The reference implementation will then be released to the community as an open source project on Codeplex under the Microsoft Permissive License (MsPL). In our implementation we use Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) for the Web Services implementation (SOAP, WS-Addressing, MTOM) and SQL Server 2005 for the Registry and Repository. What you find on Codeplex today is work in progress and I will be updating the site shortly with some instructions on how to deploy and test the implementation. If you're interested in working with us on the implementation or just to provide some feedback feel free reach out to me. We really welcome your feedback and help on this. Posted Tuesday, August 21, 2007 5:43 PM from The Healthcare IT Blog | 0 Comments Filed under: CHF, Events, HCE, HL7, IHE, MS-HUG, Standards, WCF

• MS-HUG TechForum - Lessons Learned in Forming a RHIO

  The industry position on RHIOs is that "they are so yesterday" and "HIE is the new RHIO", but it's interesting to see how many people are attracted by this topic and what kind of interest is there in learning how this is working for others. Mark Singh just spoke about the experience with SEMRHIO. A fellow blogger, MVP and well regarded authority with BizTalk and HL7 is also involved in the project, Eric Stott. The project looks good and it is in good shape now and I guess that looking at this and other examples in the industry, the most successful projects are the ones that take a very pragmatic approach, address a concrete business need and can show rapid return on investment (duh). Have a look at the presentation on the MS-HUG web site. I'm up next... Posted Tuesday, August 21, 2007 2:06 PM from The Healthcare IT Blog | 0 Comments Filed under: Events, Health Information Networks, MS-HUG

• Kicking off MS-HUG TechForum

  I'm here at the MS-HUG TechForum this week and right now sitting in the Kodiak Room in the Microsoft Conference Center where the TechForum takes place. Steve Aylward, the General Manager for the US Health and Life Sciences group, just gave us an update on the work that Microsoft is doing in supporting Healthcare Providers, Health Plans and Life Sciences customers in the US. Next up is Bill Crounse, author of the popular HealthBlog. I really like Bill, he's a great presenter and if he happens to present in a location near you, I really suggest attending. In the meantime have a look at his blog and audiocast series. Bill is presenting on Accessibility in Health and how the innovation that we have in Windows Vista and the research that we're conducting in Microsoft Research are going to address this important issue. One of the coolest things that Bill presented was InkSeine, a example of how far we can take the Ink concept on the Tablet PC. Check it out. Later today Randy Fusco, Technical Strategist for the US Healthcare Provider industry, and I will be presenting an update on  the Connected Health Framework - Architecture and Design Blueprint and the reference implementations that we are working on: Health Connection Engine (HCE), available at http://codeplex.com/HCE Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing-b (XDS.b) available at http://codeplex.com/ihe This will be the first time we will be publicly speaking about the IHE XDS.b reference implementation on .NET and I'm sure I've tickled your interest, so I'll make sure to go into more details in a future entry. The deck will be available later this week on the MS-HUG TechForum site. In the meantime you can get the XPS version of the deck on my SkyDrive: If you are on Windows Vista, you can read XPS files natively, otherwise you can install the XPS Viewer (which BTW works on Vista too and I personally prefer). Check back later today for more MS-HUG TechForum news. Posted Tuesday, August 21, 2007 12:56 PM from The Healthcare IT Blog | 0 Comments Filed under: CHF, Events, HCE, IHE, MS-HUG, Windows Vista