So I am headed to the Atlanta Working Group meeting along with Rolim, on Saturday May 4th and coming back on Thursday morning on May 9th.
If you’re going and you’d like to sit down for a beer, coffee or distilled water – I am not fussy, feel free to reach out. Face to face communication is always the best. There are a lot smart people contributing to HL7 and good things are happening.
I am looking forward to it – thanks to my family for making it possible for me to travel so much in the coming month. It’s going to be a nice opportunity for me to catch up with a lot of people I haven’t seen for a while. The HL7 organization has become a pretty buzzing place now thanks to FHIR. I can really sense it – just in terms of looking at the level of interest my blogs on the topic have been getting. I have some constructive contributions I would like to make.
Another really important thing is James Agnew pushing hard for HL7 over HTTPS. I’ll be there to give my perspective on why I think the time is right for this standard. Have you ever considered how easy it is to intercept normal unencrypted HL7 with the Minimal Lower Layer Protocol? MLLP and you – making life easy for bio-terrorists since 1991! Fortunately most HL7 interfaces are contained within secure data centers but if you get one piece of malware in, then you have open season on selectively changing the medication of any politician or celebrity you like – not a pleasant thought.
That provides a strong use case for requiring HTTPS as a protocol for handling HL7 within hospital networks – let along the joy that can be had if you you accidentally manage to point an HL7 feed at the wrong port…
I thought I would give my entry for an innovative tool to process the MIF format – something along the lines of :
cat mif.xml > /dev/null
But I am probably not going to win and a lot of people won’t appreciate my humour. Oh well.
Other events coming up are the Apps for Health event at Mohawk College on May 16th. If you are not already in the know, Mohawk College is a local powerhouse in the healthcare IT scene. It has built a reputation for itself within the eHealth community in Canada and in the US. Under the leadership of Duane Bender the college has built strong industry links and is at the forefront of what is happening with healthcare IT.
If you are in Ontario or New York State it’s a great event to attend to learn about a lot of activity that is going on in eHealth, particularly in the Canadian market. Last year there were over 200 professionals in attendance from a wide range of organizations like Ontario eHealth, Infoway, EMR companies, Ontario hospitals and many other organizations. It’s a very good place to network.
This year I think FHIR is going to be hot topic (I’m sorry that pun had to come). I’ll be going with a couple of people from my team. If you are going and you would like meet up and talk about integration etc. I’ll do my best to maintain a semi-coherent conversation. Thanks to Thomas Lukasik for finding this short You Tube video on the event – yours truly is at the end of the video beating the integration drum…
And of course, last but definitely not least is our first ever Iguana User Group Conference! We’re hosting it in our brand new over 7000 sq foot Toronto office space on the 19th and 20th of September. We just formally announced the conference yesterday and people have already started signing up. You don’t have to be a customer to come along – the event is free and it’s going to be catered (there will be beer!). I am really excited about it – there are so many interesting things that people are doing with Iguana right now that it’s going to be fun to see what people have to share.