2005 Outlook

On November 15, 2004 the Office of the National Coordinator Health Information Technology (ONCHIT) released a Request for Information (RFI) that seeks public comment regarding how widespread interoperability of health information technologies and health information exchange can be achieved through a National Health Information Network (NHIN).

While funding for Health Information Technology was removed from the Appropriations Bill by Congress, Dr. David Brailer is planning on tapping funds where he can find them.

This will likely mean more opportunities to develop better ebusiness solutions using ebXML for the health care sector and collaborative communities to help health care organizations adopt these technologies. One such community already investigating this area is the Medical Banking Project, whose Institute will present An Open Framework for eBusiness Processes on February 24.

2004 In Review

In 2004, the UK National Health Service (NHS) National Programme for Information Technology announced that they would use ebXML Messaging, the US National Institute of Health implemented Sample Content Assembly Mechanism Templates, the Artemis Project documented a Semantic Web Service-based P2P Infrastructure for the Interoperability of Medical Information systems, and Managing Medical Ontologies using OWL and an e-business Registry / Repository addressed the topic of how the knowledge embedded in OWL and medical ontologies support e-Health web service deployment that may involve the interaction of independent resources from different domains and owned by different entities.

Also, IHE released the IT Infrastructure Technical Framework 5 Supplement 2004-2005 Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing (XDS) Trial Implementation Version, the Brussels OASIS Adoption Meeting discussed EPR and XDS for e-Healthcare, and Health Level Seven, Inc. (HL7) released two version 3 transport specifications as Draft Standards for Trial Use (DSTUs): Web Services and ebXML.

Q4, 2004

U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, (CDC), an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, operates PHINMS, with state and local health agencies, clinical facilities and medical labs across the U.S. PHINMS makes use of ebXML's Messaging Service and Collaboration Protocol Agreement specifications.

Q4, 2001

Managed Healthcare Executive reported “HIPAA is an important step toward using the Internet, rather than value-added networks, for electronic health transactions. The completion of the work of the Electronic Business Extensible Markup Language (ebXML) initiative is an important step toward fulfilling this promise.” The article is here.