Tuesday, December 18, 2012

The year in review


If I had to sum up this year quickly, I'd say for me it was about Quality Measurement, Patient Engagement, and Meaningful Use Stage 2.  Most of my posts have been related to these topics.  This was also the year I took serial writing seriously.

January started year 2 of Meaningful Use.  In January, I didn't go to the IHE Connectathon for the first time in nine years.  I'll be back again this year.  For fun, I wrote The Characters in a HealthIT Standards Meeting.  In January, I was deep into planning and designing transforms for HQMF and Query Health.

February started the month that Consolidated CDA 1.1 was finalized by HL7, after several months of work with IHE, HL7 and S&I Framework.  Early in the month was an IHE meeting in Paris.  My family came along for the ride, and we learned quite a bit about communicating with French speakers.  Of course there was HIMSS, and the almost anti-climactic announcement on the Meaningful Use regulation the day after most everybody has already gone home.  ONC and HHS, stuck in their process, couldn't say much until too late.  I coded, and subsequently demonstrated transforms for HQMF and Query Health at HIMSS.  I spent a good bit of time reviewing the rules.

In March, I started a four-part post which starts here and is completed here about having too many definitions of summary care record in the rules.  It got fixed in the final rule, but there is still yet room for improvement (maybe in the 2016 edition).  In case you weren't aware, the data required for "data portability", and for transfers of care is defined identically in the rule.  HL7 began forming its Mobile Health Workgroup

I began my series on Health IT Standards 101 in April (and still have to finish it, although I expect it to be a never ending story).  For fun I wrote Four Career Lessons from the Incredible Hulk.  I issued an Ad Hoc Harley to Jeff Klann for his ability to pick up where I left off on Query Health.

May is the month for one of three regularly scheduled HL7 Working Group Meetings.  We spent a lot of time talking about FHIR, CDA, Templates and the NwHIN RFI at that meeting.  The NwHIN RFI resulted in nothing significant* happening with respect to governance out of ONC in 2012, but there were some good discussions going on here and elsewhere.  It remains to be seen what will happen in the US.

June is another good month to read some more posts about HQMF and Query Health.  At the beginning of the month, I got to take my daughter to a not so secret White House meeting called the Patient Access Summit.  And my daughter joined The Walking Gallery.  She also wrote her first post for me for this blog.  June begins the summer of standards work that I typically engage in.

July was a slow month for the blog, which usually means a heavy one for other activities.  July is when we meet to deal with the public comments and produce the trial implementation content for IHE Profiles.  I finally got around to starting my series on moving from C32 to C-CDA at the end of the month.  A good friend and colleague, Glen Marshall, retired this month.  He got the first lifetime achievement Ad Hoc Harley.

In August, ONC finally kicked off the ABBI Project, which has become one of my bigger "volunteer" efforts.  Of course, I love the acronym, and so does my daughter.  We often joke that ONC gave it that name to suck us in.  She and her younger sister even did a 180 second ad for it.  I continued my series on moving from C32 to C-CDA in this month.  And of course, we got the final rules this month, which led to another series of posts.  In August, I attended the HL7 board meeting where we approved making the IP free.  Only the rest of the world wasn't to know until nearly a month later.

September was kicked off by this huge announcement from HL7.  I've been working towards that since I was elected to the board, and will continue working on it in my second term.  I began playing quite a bit with OAuth in this month, even implementing an OAuth 1.0 Provider.  The test methods for Meaningful Use Stage 2 began to show up this month in waves.

October is the month that my ABBI prototype was moved to the cloud.  I spent a lot of time on ABBI in this month. Just for fun, I built a go-cart in a couple of days.

In November, continuing with one of this year's themes, I created a slide called Hashtag Soup: Relating QDM, HQMF, eMeasures, QueryHealth, QRDA, SIFramework and MeaningfulUse Stage2.  That slide got picked up an used by an ONC staffer for an educational slide deck.  Elsewhere, I spent half a day listening to, and responding to testimony to a House subcommittee on Meaningful Use and Meaningful Results.

December isn't over yet, but I've already been to an IHE Meeting, the mHealth Summit, and the ONC Stakeholder Meeting this month, including the ABBI Town Hall Meeting.  IHE USA announced it's new certification program, and well, there's just a lot going on.

* Just days before the year ended, ONC announced a grant on Governance.

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