Healthcare

Mission:
- To improve the quality of care and reduce costs through the use of interoperability technologies throughout the global healthcare community.
- To utilize the OMG technology adoption process to standardize interfaces for healthcare objects
- To communicate the requirements of the healthcare industry to the OMG Membership
- To assist and advise the OMG liaisons regarding the relationship with healthcare standards organizations and consortia.
Charter:
The net result provides several benefits to adopters of these standards:
- Ability to extend current EHR solutions to effectively address gaps between institutions.
- Establish and promote consistency within an institution across multiple applications (such as shared Clinical Decision Support or Terminology Services).
- Provides an underpinning platform to allow for adoption of new capabilities or innovation, provided by enabling a shared services bus.
- Extends HL7 FHIR® to support more complex workflow and transaction management functionality.
- Allows for an integrative approach bringing together existing and emerging data sharing protocols.
- Provides the basis for a service-enabled e-health infrastructure.
Concept of Operation:
Within the health industry, there is no shortage of standards work or of potential technical solutions that are able to add value to this complex and persistently “disconnected” vertical market sector. What has been lacking, however, is a cohesive view and integrative set of complementary functions designed to work with existing systems to effectively bridge across incumbent systems and solutions in support of connected-health and care continuity.
The suite of OMG healthcare standards were developed in concert with Health Level Seven (HL7), and provide a superstructure allowing for peaceful co-existence of yesterday’s integration strategies while aligning with current industry best-practices, drawing from other vertical market solutions and proven technical approaches. Based upon model-driven architecture, this suite of standards comfortably supports concurrent use of many different interface protocols into a cohesive platform, providing a foundation to extend current systems beyond institutional boundaries using an open, standards-based infrastructure.
Work In Progress:
- Coordination of Care Service (CCS ) – The cornerstone to effective care coordination is the establishment of a patient-centric care plan, providing access to each member of that patient’s care team, and visibility across that team. The Coordination of Care Service defines and industry-standard interface for interacting with that care plan and care team, from care plan reconciliation to care team communications to managing patient preferences and permissions.
- Ordering Service – In support of ordering portability, this service allows for order creation, management, and fulfilment spanning electronic health record (EHR) systems. It also includes order catalog management, providing access and maintenance of the set of orderable items.
Adopted Specs:
- [Health] Services Directory (ServD) – Part “Provider Directory” and part “Yellow Pages” TM, this standard provides the ability to discover health and ancillary service providers based upon their organizational affiliation, location, and other details, and provides ability to contact and ultimately supports the secure transfer of health data to designated, trusted network end-points.
- Clinical Decision Support Service (CDSS™) – Allows for access to industry best-practices and institutional or licensed knowledge to conduct patient-specific assessment and provide recommendations to clinicians on best-practice or suggested protocols. This standard facilitates the implementation, maintenance, and consistency of clinical practice across clinical applications.
- [Common] Terminology Services (CTS2™) – Underpinning the ability to effectively interchange medical information lies the support for medical coding systems and vocabularies. CTS2 allows for applications to become semantically-aware, looking up the meaning of coded values, traversing inherent relationships to draw inferences, and supporting translation between different vocabularies or languages. Designed to work with both medical terminologies such as ICD10/11, SNOMED, LOINC, RxNORM, and others.
- Archetype Modeling Language™ (AML™) – Underpinning “semantic interoperability” (allowing for information to flow while retaining its context and meaning) is a body of medical knowledge and the ability to express that in models that enumerate information fields, their interrelationship among one another, bindings to clinical vocabularies/terminology, and data structure. For example, the expression of “vital signs” or a “blood pressure” could conceivably contain different data elements depending upon the organization and their mandatory fields, instrumentation, reference ranges, preferred terminologies, and so on. AML provides a language to express this knowledge, based upon a specialized profile of UML, allowing for the use of off-the-shelf tooling to conduct this very nuanced and specific health modeling.
Get Involved:
If you are interested in getting involved with this group, want more information or would like to come as a guest to an upcoming meeting and obtain temporary access to the mailing list, please contact one of our Account Representative or contact one of the Chairs.