[COAS-List] Abdul-Malik

[Howard_Chase@idx.com]

To:   coas
Hi All,

I also tried to get hold of Abdul-Malik.  Failing email, we did manage to
trade voice mails, but I haven't yet spoken with him.  In his last voice
mail, he suggested getting people focused on clinical observation parts of
the RIM and sounded like he wouldn't be able to make it to the CO meeting.

I'll continue to try and post a message here if I talk to him.

I will not be at CO or Helsinki, but plan on being in Seattle.

Howard Chase
IDX Systems
---------------------- Forwarded by Howard Chase/BVT/IDX1 on 07/16/98 08:21
AM ---------------------------


Tim Brinson <tim@protocol.com> on 07/15/98 05:12:53 PM

To:   Abdul-Malik Shakir; beeler; tklein
cc:   Mary Kratz <mkratz@umich.edu>, coas@cs.fiu.edu, hammo001@mc.duke.edu,
      Mary.Richards@hboc.com, Howard Chase/BVT/IDX1,
      tcculpepper@wpmail.code3.com, jfarmer@caredatasystems.com,
      juggy@careflow.com, Charles Carman <ccarman@medgrid.philips.com>
Subject:  Re: CORBAmed Clinical Observation Access Service
Body:



Hello Woody, Ted, and Abdul-Malik,


I have been trying to reach each of you but you have been out.  Woody,
your assistant asked me to send an email instead.

When CORBAmed issued the Clinical Observations RFI last year two of the
eight responses was from HL7 (SGMLSIG and IMSIG).  The RFP we issued in
this area (COAS) is designed to complement the strength of HL7 messaging
with a query capability based on client server technology.

As Mary Kratz had emailed you the companies working on the Clinical
Observations Access Service (COAS) are meeting next week (21-23 July).
I should make a note that this is NOT an OMG meeting.  Due to anti-trust
laws the work done by companies on the work submitted to the OMG has be
done on their own.  While the list of contributors is long the official
submitters to COAS are 3M, Care Data Systems, CareFlow|Net, HBOC,
Philips Medical and Protocol Systems.  We invite your participation.

One of the main tasks for next week is to get a direction for the
modeling of observations.  As you may know we (the COAS submitters) are
all HL7 members and want to be as compatible with the RIM as we can.  We
realize the RIM is not final yet and I have heard there are plans to do
more work on the observations (OBX related) area.  The current version
of the RIM I have is 84.

We are also looking at other modeling efforts as they are modeling
things from a different point of view than HL7.  These include the
European projects COSMOS, GEHR, Synapes, STAR, and CEN TC 251 WG IV.  We
are also looking at the DICOM Structured Reporting document but its
model of observations seem to come from a similar view as HL7 any way
(and its difficult to follow all the tables).

As opposed to the COAS submitters making their own interpretations of
these other works we have been working with the core individuals in each
project/standard.  The funny thing is that even though we (COAS
submitters) all come from an HL7 background we are having a difficult
time contacting the core individuals for the HL7 modeling work - you!  I
reallize you are all busy within your own company and doing HL7 work.
One of the things you could help us with are identifying areas of the
RIM that are more stable and giving us a sense on the direction and time
frame of the other areas.

The clincial data passed by COAS will be formatted as IDL data types
that are determined from the models of observations we use.  The COAS
will be designed to pass generic data types.  For this reason HL7 3.0
data definitions should be able to be passsed by the service once they
are finalized (as different IDL data types).  We are hoping to get
experience with the current RIM work now.

An alternative would be for us to just use version 2.3 but we know the
work you are doing now is filling some of the holes and we would like to
leverage those benefits.  We plan to feed our experience back which
could possibly improve the final outcome of version 3.0.  This can act
as a prototype useage of a small (but important) part of the RIM.

I should caution you that COAS does not deal with the whole area as the
HL7 RIM.  We have not determined the exact scope but we want to keep it
to a quite small and managable piece focused on observations data.  For
example we know it will not deal directly with DICOM images since there
is another effort dealing with that subject.

Any way the reason I have contacted you is to invite your
participation.  You are welcome to attend the meeting next week in the
Denver area (see attached directions).  This should be a good meeting as
we have representation from a number of companies and other
organizations (DICOM, DoD HA, LANL, Sandia, Baptist).  The COAS
submitters are also meeting during the OMG meeting week (27 July) in
Helsinki with representatives from the European projects.  I reallize
that may be difficult to attend but you are welcome any way.  Our work
will continue for some time (months) but these meetings in the next
couple weeks will set the direction for COAS.

You can still participate even if none of you can make either of these
meetings.  We have a mail list set up for related discussions
(coas@cs.fiu.edu).


Regards,

Tim Brinson