About Us
Lantana Consulting Group provides services and software for standards-based health information exchange. We have built our expertise through more than a decade of involvement in standards development and deployment.
We focus on design and implementation of Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) and Fast Healthcare Interoperable Resources (FHIR) compliant systems, including validation, document management, authoring, data conversion, and web services for information exchange. We support these implementations with extensive background and depth in health informatics, healthcare terminologies and project management.
Our work focuses on the benefits of EHR data management for quality reporting, public health reporting, research, and meaningful use of electronic records.
The investment in clinical data capture and management by providers must survive the inevitable changes in applications, communications and exchange protocols.
VISION
We want to see health information available across the spectrum of care, supporting safe, equitable, effective, affordable healthcare that improves well-being, public health, quality of care, and research.
VALUES
We take an incremental approach to change. Semantic interoperability, while difficult to achieve, is essential and possible when built on a solid foundation that respects the integrity of the clinical record and clinical processes.
Standards are the foundation of health IT interoperability and data standards are the most essential. We have watched interoperability gain ground around the world, and we see that the applications supporting it will continue to evolve, while the data itself can and should remain stable.
The investment in clinical data capture and management by providers must survive the inevitable changes in applications, communications and exchange protocols. Clinical data is the largest investment that a provider makes and should remain usable over time, serving multiple demands for operational intelligence and decision support.
Lantana also values environmental sustainability in our business practices. Through our initiative, greenLantana, we work to improve the health of our employees and the environment in our everyday way of doing business.
Innovation
We are proud of Lantana’s record of innovation. Some of the “firsts” we led or took leadership roles in are:
- Extensible Markup Language (XML) as the exchange syntax for HL7, making it the first standards development organization to adopt XML in healthcare
- Clinical Document Architecture (CDA), from concept to implementation
- Schematron for CDA validation
- Online CDA Validator, the first public tool for automated validation of clinical notes and the prototype for similar tools that followed
- The concept of "greenCDA", developing a ballot, initial samples, and transforms that contributed to Grahame Grieve’s concept of simplified exchange in the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) specification
- A series of implementation guides reusing Continuity of Care Document (CCD) templates in the Health Story Project, which later led the effort to “consolidate” these into Consolidated CDA (C-CDA)
- Modular CDA Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) Stylesheets
- The first application of CDA for public health reporting for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) National Healthcare Safety Network
- Exchange of the C-CDA “Care Plan” through the Health Story Project at Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS)
- Trifolia Workbench, an open source authoring and management tool for CDA templates and FHIR Profiles used by CDC, National Cancer Institute (NCI), and over 1,100 users
- The first approach to standards-based quality reporting from an electronic health record (EHR) in the Quality Reporting Document Architecture (QRDA)
- The standard Healthcare Quality Measure Format (HQMF or eMeasure) under the auspices of the National Quality Forum (NQF) and in conjunction with American Medical Association (AMA) and other measure development stakeholders
Company Overview
Lantana Consulting Group helps government agencies, hospitals, technology companies and insurance providers achieve clinical information exchange to support continuity of care and information-driven policy and decision making. The company has been expanding steadily, keeping pace with new federal standards for digitizing medical records, patient demand for portable information, the growing recognition that data is needed to drive change, and hospitals’ need to identify cost savings.
Rationale
In healthcare, patient data is not widely shared or available. Patients often must re-create their medical histories for every new doctor, specialist and hospital they visit, which is inefficient and can lead to medical errors. Electronic health records are not easily accessible and transferable because even when computerized, doctor’s offices, hospitals and health clinics are not using the same standard to collect and preserve data. Lantana’s core competence lies in the solutions to this challenge.
History
Lantana consultants have been leading in the health information exchange space since the early 1990s, leading the development of internationally adopted data standards that support exchange and data reuse. Lantana’s services are in even greater demand now that there are national (and international) incentives to move toward health information exchange.
Founding Date
Lantana was originally formed as Alschuler Associates, LLC in June 2005 and rebranded as Lantana on January 1, 2011. Lantana operates in a distributed environment, currently with more than 30 consultants positioned throughout the U.S., Australia and Canada.
Involvement
Lantana provides the equivalent of a full-time employee toward volunteer activities each year. We contribute time and tools to support standards adoption and implementation.
Employees fill the following volunteer positions and commitments:
- Co-Chair, HL7 Structured Documents Work Group: Sean McIlvenna
- Co-Chair, HL7 FHIR Infrastructure Work Group: Rick Geimer
- Board Member, HL7 Australia: Sarah Gaunt
- President-Elect, Delaware Valley & Pennsylvania APIC Chapter: Marissa McMeen
- Member, Women Business Leaders in Healthcare: Liora Alschuler
- Member, HIMSS Women in Health IT Roundtable: Liora Alschuler
- Member, CSTE Surveillance and Informatics Steering Committee: Laura Blum
- Member, CSTE Healthcare-Associated Infections Subcommittee: Heather Dubrendris, Laura Blum
- Member, NQF Measure Incubator project: Hector Cariello
- Member: HL7 CDA Management Group: Zabrina Gonzaga
- Member: ONC FHIR at Scale Taskforce (FAST): Rick Geimer
- Member, HL7 Clinical Quality Information and Clinical Decision Support Workgroups: Angela Flanagan, Lynn Perrine, Robin Williams
- Board Member, OKHIMSS Chapter: Angela Flanagan
- CAHIMS/CPHIMS Certified Instructor: Angela Flanagan
- Member HIMSS Nursing Informatics Community: Angela Flanagan, Lynn Perrine
- Member, HIMMS Nursing Informatics Education & Networking Task Force: Lynn Perrine
- Member, Iowa Chapter of HIMSS Program Committee: Lynn Perrine
- Member, HL7 Post-Acute Care Interoperability (PACIO) Work Group: Zabrina Gonzaga
- Member, LOINC Nursing and Clinical Committees: Lynn Perrine, Angela Flanagan, and Marla Throckmorton
We've developed license-free tools to accelerate standards adoption:
- Trifolia-on-FHIR: An online FHIR implementation guide (IG) creation and publishing tool that integrates the FHIR IG Publishing tool within the application.
- Trifolia Workbench: A tool for developing and localizing CDA Templates and FHIR Profiles
- CDA Validator: An online tool to check CDA instances against Schematron rules.
- FHIR.JS: An open-source JavaScript module that serializes and deserializes FHIR resources between JSON and XML
- Term-Query: A light-weight JavaScript command-line tool that runs queries against terminology service providers
- PhCP Public Transforms: Bi-directional C-CDA/FHIR XSLT transforms, designed to support Pharmacist Care Plan documents, but extended over time to support much of Consolidated CDA in general.
In collaboration with the EHR Association, Lantana created Quick Start Guides for both CDA and the CCD.
