The HL7-OMG Healthcare Services Specification Project: Motivation, Methodology, and Deliverables for Enabling a Semantically Interoperable Service-oriented Architecture for Healthcare
- Affiliations of the authors: Division of Clinical Informatics, Department of Community and Family Medicine (KK), Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy (KK), Duke University, Durham, NC; SOA Architect, Walnut Creek, CA (AH); Federal Healthcare Portfolio, Electronic Data Systems, An HP Company, Bowie, MD (KR)
- Correspondence: Kensaku Kawamoto, M.D., Ph.D., Division of Clinical Informatics, DUMC Box 104007, Durham, NC 27710; e-mail: <kawam001{at}mc.duke.edu>
- Received 30 December 2008
- Accepted 12 August 2009
Abstract
Context The healthcare industry could achieve significant benefits through the adoption of a service-oriented architecture (SOA). The specification and adoption of standard software service interfaces will be critical to achieving these benefits.
Objective To develop a replicable, collaborative framework for standardizing the interfaces of software services important to healthcare.
Design Iterative, peer-reviewed development of a framework for generating interoperable service specifications that build on existing and ongoing standardization efforts. The framework was created under the auspices of the Healthcare Services Specification Project (HSSP), which was initiated in 2005 as a joint initiative between Health Level7 (HL7) and the Object Management Group (OMG). In this framework, known as the HSSP Service Specification Framework, HL7 identifies candidates for service standardization and defines normative Service Functional Models (SFMs) that specify the capabilities and conformance criteria for these services. OMG then uses these SFMs to generate technical service specifications as well as reference implementations.
Measurements The ability of the framework to support the creation of multiple, interoperable service specifications useful for healthcare.
Results Functional specifications have been defined through HL7 for four services: the Decision Support Service; the Entity Identification Service; the Clinical Research Filtered Query Service; and the Retrieve, Locate, and Update Service. Technical specifications and commercial implementations have been developed for two of these services within OMG. Furthermore, three additional functional specifications are being developed through HL7.
Conclusions The HSSP Service Specification Framework provides a replicable and collaborative approach to defining standardized service specifications for healthcare.
Footnotes
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KK's effort on HSSP and related projects has been supported by National Institute of Health grants T32-GM07171, F37-LM008161, K01-HG004645, R41-LM009051, and R42-LM009051; Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality grants R01-HS10472, R01-HS015057, and R03-HS10814; and Health Resources and Services Administration grant H2ATH00998. The other authors' efforts were supported by their employers [KR–EDS, an HP Company; AH—Kaiser Permanente until 2008; currently an independent consultant contracted to the International Institute for Safety in Medicine (II4SM)]. All authors contributed to the conception and design of the manuscript, and KK drafted the manuscript. All authors contributed to the critical revision of the manuscript.
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The authors are members of HL7 and OMG. KR is co-chair of the OMG Healthcare Domain Task Force. AH and KR are or have been co-chairs of the HL7 SOA Working Group. KK is the project lead of the HL7 Decision Support Service project, AH was the main author of the HL7 EIS SFM, KR was the main author of the SSF, and all authors were coauthors of the HL7 RLUS SFM.
KK holds intellectual property rights to a CDS technology known as SEBASTIAN that can provide its capabilities through an HSSP Decision Support Service interface. These intellectual property rights are held in a holding company known as Kedasys, LLC, and the technology has been licensed to Religent, Inc. for commercialization through the assistance of Small Business Technology Transfer grants R41-LM009051 and R42-LM009051 from the National Library of Medicine. KK and Duke University may benefit financially if products using the SEBASTIAN technology are commercially successful. Of note, the OMG process requires that any intellectual property required for implementing to the interface standards are made available to others for free or on nondiscriminatory and commercially reasonable terms.
The views expressed in this manuscript are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the official opinions of the organizations with which the authors are affiliated.
