For some time I have been working with a number of folks at MITRE on a simple representation for electronic health data. Digging into the depth of various standards organizations such as HL7, HITSP, or HIMSS was interesting, painful, and enlightening at the same time. Since last week, our project is online at http://projecthdata.org/, and the hData project has announced releasing specifications, schemas, and code there soon. At this time, you can get the hData white paper, which was also presented at the recent Balisage 2009 conference in Montreal. Overall, hData’s approach is very much focused on implementability and ease-of use for developers (since – quoting Mike Kay at Balisage – “As a developer I am also human.”)
Interestingly enough, the combination of ODF/Jar style packaging and RESTful integration (taking a ZIP archive of hierarchically organized component documents and representing it as a collection of resources) has some folks interested. If there are more, I will suggest taking this out of hData and creating an independent specification.
tags: hData ehr health care hl7
Gerald,
Congratulations on your hData work going live – very impressive!
I am particularly interested in the ideas you have on leveraging the Composite Pattern packaging style (as used in ODF, OOXML, JAR, etc.) and turning it into a RESTful ATOM syndication interface. I think this has a lot of promise and is a general enough pattern that it would be useful beyond the health data domain. It would be great to draft something describing your ideas and get some broader discussion going.
Regards,
Stuart