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HL7 International Working Meeting hears US Govt. e-Health Plans At the recent Plenary Working Meeting of HL7 International in Atlanta, USA, ONC chief Dr David Blumenthal outlined the approach that the US Office of the NAtional Coordinator is taking for Standards Development. Listen to Dr Blumenthal's speach here: http://www.HL7.org/plenary/index.cfm HL7 Working Meeting in Kyoto a Success - despite GEC and Swine Flu... The International HL7 Working Meeting in Kyoto, Japan, was hailed by all participants as very successful. Although a number of corporations and parts of the US government still ban overseas travel, enough volunteers were able to travel to Kyoto to progress the various HL7 Standards in over 40 Work Groups. The sudden escalation of the swine influenza epidemic forced some delegations to cancel their attendance at the last minute and HL7 staff were quarantined by the Japanese health authorities... The HL7 community looks forward to the Plenary Meeting in September in Atlanta, USA, and the Meeting in Rio next May! Global HL7 Standards Ballot are Open HL7 Global is now balloting: Clinical Document Architecture (CDA), Electronic Health Records, Version 3 Messaging, Version 3 Infrastructure and FoundationSpecifications, Clinical Context Object Workgroup (CCOW), etc. All ballots are now open and scheduled to close on Thursday, April 30th, 2009. For more information on the ballot see http://tinyurl.com/c46o8j HL7 News, Tools and Resources Update now on Twitter! The updates on HL7 News, Tools and Resources are now also on Twitter. Get immediate updates without having to visit web sites or track RSS feeds. Follow now! Registrations for HL7 Kyoto Working Meeting open! The next HL7 Working Meeting will be in Kyoto, Japan, from May 10-15, 2009. The Working Meeting will be preceded by the International HL7 Implementation Conference 2009 (IHIC'09) where the latest reports on leading edge HL7 implemenations will be given. Register now! Interoperability in the Real World... In his "Health Interoperability" Blog, Ken Rubin writes about understanding and appreciating the value, the importance and the necessity of tooling in achieving health interoperability objectives. "When I speak to folks that are working in the trenches ... it becomes clear that it is all about the tooling." Read more ... Mirth V1.7.1 supports HL7 and DICOM The open source Mirth 1.7.1 interface engine now includes support for the Digital Imaging in Medicine (DiCOM) standard. Robust support for HL7 V2.x and V3, XML, EDI X12 and NCPDP have been a feature of Mirth in the past but DiCOM support is a natural extension for Mirth to provide system integrators and RIS and PACS vendors with a low-cost interoperability solution. HL7 Comm V0.8 Released HL7 Comm is a robust HL7 communications client that can perform network communication, translation, file actions, logic and much more on HL7 messages. Perl HL7 Toolkit Updated The Perl HL7 Toolkit has been updated to V0.74. The Toolkit provides simple but flexible HL7 protocol handling. It consists of a Perl API for manipulating HL7 messages, an implementation of a server for developing HL7 capable applications in Perl and a queue daemon for polling non-HL7 queues, like database, filesystems, etc. It also translates messages to and from HL7. Connecting Health HHL7 Workbench The ConHHL7 Workbench allows you to define the grammar, test messages and easily incorpate HL7 into your application. Use the .Net Utility Class or the ActiveX/Com interfaces. The Workbench is based on XML technology, hides most of the inner workings of HL7 and is claimed to be fast and easy to use. Microsoft releases BizTalk Server 2006 R2 upgrade with HL7 and RFID support BizTalk Server 2006 R2 adds a device abstraction layer enabling it to record information from RFID systems and supporting linkages to core supply chain processes. R2 also provides out-of-the-box support for the HL7 and HIPAA healthcare standards. Looking for an Open-Source .NET HL7 Parser? The best option appears to be "NHapi", a new port of the popular HAPI Java HL7 parser. Although the project does not seem to be very active and lacks documentation, the code appears to be solid. Thankfully, Ashley Tate (Alpharetta USA) has now created documentation and help packages for NHAPI. How can HL7 and XML Formats co-exist in Clinical Messaging? While most HL7 interfaces today are using the HL7 2.x encoded format, the CDA, CCR and CCD standards are choosing XML as their message format. This creates some interesting questions about how these two approaches can work together. HL7 opens Ballots for V2.5.1, V3 and CDA R2 Standards The ballots for HL7 V2.5.1 and V3 Messaging and Clinical Document Architecture R2 for the September 2007 ballot cycle are now open. ChainBuilder Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) supports HL7 ChainBuilder ESB supports the creation of new HL7 message definitions and the modification of existing definitions. ChainBuilder ESB's HL7 Editor creates integration components for HL7 messages for use by the ChainBuilder ESB Parser Service Engine. ChainBulder ESB is an open source product. Chameleon V4.1 and Iguana V3.2.155 have been released by iNTERFACEWARE Chameleon is a widely used HL7 toolkit that has been deployed in thousands of sites since 1997. Iguana is an HL7 interface engine that is powered by Chameleon. HL7.org Releases Newest Standard: Version 2.5.1 Health Level 7 has announced the release of HL7 V2.5.1. Additional fields were added in V2.5.1 to the Observation/Result (OBX) segment of the Standard to support regulations that require clinical laboratories to include in each laboratory report the name and address of the performing lab and the name of the lab?s medical director. The Observation Request (OBR) and Common Order (ORC) segments of the standard have been updated to comply with the ELINCS standard that requires clinical laboratories to capture the association between a test not included in the original order but performed due to the result of another test. APELON Vocabulary Server now Open Source Apelon has announced that it has placed its Distributed Terminology System (DTS) software in SourceForge as an open source project. DTS assists in the management, integration and deployment of structured medical terminology.

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