Predictable Reporting: Community Pharmacists as Care Team Members within the Medical Neighborhood

Community Care of North Carolina (CCNC), the primary care case management program for NC Medicaid, found that it needed consistent, structured, and coded data from its community pharmacy partners in the Community Pharmacy Enhanced Services Network (CPESN) in order to support quality metrics. During the initial years of CPESN pharmacy partnerships, community pharmacy encounters with…

Read More

Why Payers Should Play with FHIR

This blog introduces participants working on clinical data exchange and value-based care to HL7’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard and Connectathon, an event that tests FHIR’s interoperability mettle. Since Connectathon 1 in 2012, the buzz around FHIR has grown exponentially. Word on the street is HL7 has trouble finding hotel conference rooms large enough to fit all attendees! HL7 will host Connectathon 14 in January 2017 in San Antonio.

Read More

Trifolia 4.0.0 Release Notes

This is the second major open source release of Trifolia. The update simplifies the installation process for users who wish to install Trifolia on their own systems, and improves support for the latest release of FHIR. It also includes an upgrade so that users in China can log in without using Google Captcha . Finally, it…

Read More

Comments on Standards for Claims Attachments

Co-author: Kanwarpreet Sethi   Lantana Consulting Group commented on the testimony provided on February 16, 2016, to the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics (NCVHS) Subcommittee on Standards, Hearing on HIPAA and ACA Administrative Simplification — Phase IV Operating Rules and Attachment Standard (Part 2). We agree with the many comments urging a low…

Read More

Conversation from the Sidelines: HL7 January 2016 in Orlando, FL

  “Conversation from the Sidelines” is a new series at Lantana’s blog. We’ll share experiences from conferences or events that gave us a different perspective on the industry.   First up, the HL7 January 2016 Working Group Meeting (WGM) in Orlando, FL. gave me an opportunity to fill-in for Crystal Kallem as an Interim Co-Chair…

Read More

Consolidated CDA: Pursuing Continuous Improvement

  Recently, I helped a team of HIT vendors implement an experiment to study the new HL7 Consolidated CDA (C-CDA) Care Plan Document template. This template includes constraints on a base standard, called HL7 Clinical Document Architecture (CDA), to meet the requirements for care plan information sharing. The CDA standard is a draft standard for…

Read More

Development, implementation, and initial evaluation of a foundational open interoperability standard for oncology treatment planning and summarization, JAMIA January 2015

Authors: Jeremy L. Warner, Suzanne E. Maddux, Kevin S. Hughes, John C. Krauss, Peter Paul Yu, Lawrence N. Shulman, Deborah K. Mayer, Mike Hogarth , Mark Shafarman , Allison Stover Fiscalini, Laura Esserman, Liora Alschuler , George Augustine Koromia, Zabrina Gonzaga, Edward P. Ambinder The objective of this article was to develop and evaluate a foundational oncology-specific standard for…

Read More

What’s new in Trifolia 2.14

Trifolia version 2.14 is now available. Several updates have been made to the user interface, template editor, template viewer and browsing functions to improve user experience.

Read More

Conformance Drift in Consolidated CDA R2; Part Two of Three

The HL7 Consolidated Clinical Document Architecture (C-CDA) Release 2 ballot received an unprecedented 1,000+ comments. A number of those comments include proposals to tighten various constraints within the document. Here are some arguments towards constraint tightening.

Read More

Conformance Drift in Consolidated CDA R2; Part One of Three

The HL7 Consolidated Clinical Document Architecture (C-CDA) Release 2 ballot received an unprecedented 1,000+ comments. A number of those comments include proposals to tighten various constraints within the document. Although tightened constraints sometimes are necessary, they may also represent bad spec design in the form of a “conformance drift,” a situation in which increasingly restrictive conformance verbs are applied to truly optional elements thus idealizing one implementation of the spec to the exclusion of others.

Read More

Template Versioning for Consolidated CDA (C-CDA)

The HL7 Structured Documents Working Group (SDWG) is discussing approaches to template versioning in Consolidated CDA (C-CDA). I suggest here a strategy that is consistent with current policy on identifiers.

Read More

Ready for Write-Enabled Trifolia Workbench?

Lantana will soon release an enhanced, write-enabled version of the Trifolia Workbench: HL7 Web Edition for HL7 Members. Trifolia Workbench is a web-based standards development tool that supports designers, developers and implementers in capturing and managing HL7 RIM-based templates, such as the Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) and the Healthcare Quality Measure Format (HQMF/eMeasure).

Read More

Join the Ballot Pool for C-CDA (by Monday)

As part of the ongoing effort to enable more consistent and accurate clinical data exchange, the HL7 Implementation Guide for CDA® Release 2: Consolidated CDA Templates for Clinical Notes (US Realm) Draft Standard for Trial Use Release 2 continues to build on the library of CDA R2 templates consolidated within the first release.

Read More

Updated C-CDA and QRDA Specs Now Available

The updates address errata approved by the HL7 Structured Document Work Group. Both draft standards for trial use are referenced in the Certification Criteria for Meaningful Use Stage 2…

Read More

Our Perspective on Updating Consolidated CDA

Several proposals have come forward to augment HL7 Consolidated CDA with additional templates. The Structured Documents Work Group has taken the position that new templates supporting long term care will be added in an addendum rather than integrated into a new release of the spec. I think this position needs to be reconsidered both as a general course and for the specific material. Here’s why.

Read More

Making use of electronic data: The National Healthcare Safety Network eSurveillance Initiative

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as part of National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN), is developing a standard framework to support the electronic submission of health care-associated infections (HAIs) and antimicrobial use and resistance (AUR). The article outlines three key challenges to collecting this data electronically and shares background and success stories on…

Read More