Free Text Sig

Discord is afoot. It has been for some time now. The cause is a little understood data element known as “Free Text Sig”.

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CDA Experts on FHIR

At Lantana, we are all pretty comfortable working with CDA. I think we are also pretty open to understanding its limitations. The current CDA, Release 2, was developed ten years ago. It was designed to meet a range of requirements from simple, transformed-from-dictation documents to fully coded, semantically interoperable reports. A key design consideration, a requirement for passing ballot within HL7 at that time, was full compatibility with Version 3 messaging and an explicit tie-in to the Reference Information Model (RIM).

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Are Meaningful Use Stage 2 certified EHRs ready for interoperability? Findings from the SMART C-CDA Collaborative

Upgrades to electronic health record (EHR) systems scheduled to be introduced in the USA in 2014 will advance document interoperability between care providers. Specifically, the second stage of the federal incentive program for EHR adoption, known as Meaningful Use, requires use of the Consolidated Clinical Document Architecture (C-CDA) for document exchange. In an effort to…

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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.

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Proposed Delays to 2014 Meaningful Use Timeline & and Changes to Certified Electronic Health Care Technology (CEHRT). How will you be affected?

Today, CMS announced proposed changes to Medicare and Medicaid electronic health record incentive program timeline for 2014 and revisions to the CEHRT definition. As a courtesy, Lantana put this summary together outlining the changes and how they may affect vendors and care providers. The full fact sheet can be found here. Why the change? CMS…

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Brag Blog: HAIMS Nails it for Veterans

The great thing about a career in health IT is that we have so many problems to solve. The drag is that it occasionally feels as if we operate on a treadmill of ever-receding achievement. In this space, I want to recognize a solid achievement in health IT in which Lantana played a part. It…

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Lantana Annual Retreat: Full Speed Forward

Lantana’s company retreat started out with a review of the company vision statement, pared down to the following: “We want to see health information available across the spectrum of care, supporting safe, effective, affordable healthcare that improves well-being, public health, quality of care, and research.”

From there, we spent a day and a half reviewing our goals, strategy, and tactics to realize this vision. We found, to our satisfaction, that our long-time company motto[i], “have fun, make money, improve the industry” works just fine to articulate our goals.

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Rest Secure

A security update for the long-standing CDA style sheet is available from Lantana Consulting Group here. This update addresses a potential vulnerability exposed by use of the style sheet in many current internet applications by preventing malicious insertion of executable code into the display instructions for non-XML clinical documents (allowed as the body in Consolidated…

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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CDA Academy Hat Visits Machu Picchu

CDA Academy Alumnus, David Swiezy, Allscripts, took his CDA Academy hat along on several adventures—to Machu Picchu in Peru and to the Galapagos Islands.

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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.

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