Finalizing the recent series of events, the hData specs have achieved a major milestone: the HL7 hData Record Format was approved to be published as a Draft Standard for Trial Use (DSTU), completing the HL7 project setup to achieve this goal. Also, the OMG hData REST Binding for RLUS is now a Beta standard with a Finalization Task Force in place.
So what does this mean? The entire suite of hData specifications has now completed a full peer-review within their respective standards body, and has been adopted by the organizations. As such, they are on their way to be fully accredited standards within the Health IT community.
But, what’s next? Obviously, we want to finalize the standards and take them to become fully normative standards. To achieve this, we will need to monitor how implementations work in the field, and what issues arise. Also, we will need to use hData in the context of actual use cases. In a first step, the Pharmacy and SOA working groups at HL7 have agreed to standardize an hData Content Profile for Medication Statements, thus making this important product available to RESTful Health IT service developers. Also, various people have indicated that JSON representations of Continuity of Care information can be very useful.