Elysa,
I have received a request from João Moreira, the graduate student from the Netherlands that posed questions on TEP and the transform earlier this year. He is
now asking us to join a consortium to collaborate in a proposal on “PPI for uptake of standards for the exchange of digitalised healthcare records” that is forthcoming (see thread below).
Can you add this to the agenda for tomorrows TC call tomorrow?
Patti
Patti Iles Aymond, PhD
Senior Scientist, Research & Development
IEM
8710 Jefferson Highway
Baton Rouge, LA 70809
(225) 526-8844 (voice and fax)
From: João Moreira (UTwente) [mailto:j.luizrebelomoreira@utwente.nl]
Sent: Wednesday, July 27, 2016 5:35 AM
To: Aymond, Patti
Subject: Re: EDXL-TEP: questions for a literature review and contact
Dear Patti,
At first, sorry for the late contact, I was waiting for the publication of the proceedings book to send to you the published version, but it is not published yet. The conference organizers said that it is about to be published and will
contact me. Anyway, I'm attaching the final version submitted here.
I still working on an ontological analysis of EDXL standards for epidemiological surveillance. Recently I visited the Laboratory for Applied Ontology (http://www.loa.istc.cnr.it/) and I talked to
Nicola Guarino - the "father" of formal ontology, working in this field since the 80s - about a collaboration with them to support this ontological analysis. The expected outcome is a deep analysis of the standards based on the most foundational aspects, such
as the identity principles used, the rigidity types (rigid, non-rigid and semi-rigid) of the concepts, the relations' dependency types (generic, specific and existential), types of relations (formal and material), besides the most recent work on events and
causality relations - BTW, this part may be the main theoretical contribution of my PhD, I'm studying how to use the Brandford Hill criteria for causation between situations and events, often used in epidemiology.
Besides keeping the contact with you and giving this update, I'd like to know if you are aware about this H2020 call related to eHealth interoperability standards: "SC1-PM-19-2017: PPI for uptake of standards
for the exchange of digitalised healthcare records". I'm trying to find consortiums (which are planning to submit a proposal) to include my work, especially the part of EDXL for epidemiological surveillance. However, if I don't find any, I'd like to
try to establish a consortium and to write a proposal (actually, my supervisors write and I support them). In both cases, I'd like to have you (OASIS) as a participant, what do you think? We have to discuss the specific role, but at first glance I think the
work you're doing on the transformations EDXL <-> HL7 fits perfectly to this call. For now, the other partners would be:
- LOA: ontological analysis of the involved standards
- DTLs (http://www.dtls.nl/fair-data/): FAIR data
- Menthor (http://www.menthor.net/): tooling support for ontological analysis and automatic generation of EDXL messages (MDE transformations)
- Maastricht University: use of social networks (e.g. Twitter) for monitoring disease outbreaks (having the information avaiable as a service conformant with EDXL)
DTL will also help on contacting with the "user" partners (from healthcare field), such as WHO, RIVM and ECDC, I know that their participation is essential for this type of consortium. Feel free to give any comments, suggestions or critics.
Kind regards,
João
|
Topic: |
SC1-PM-19-2017:
PPI for uptake of standards for the exchange of digitalised healthcare records |
Forthcoming |
|
Publication date: |
14 October 2015 |
|
|
|||
|
Types of action: |
PPI Public Procurement of Innovative solutions |
||
|
DeadlineModel: |
single-stage |
Deadline: |
14 March 2017 17:00:00 |
Topic Description
Specific Challenge:
The use of interoperability standards is essential to the wider deployment of an EU eHealth single market. Despite previous Framework Programmes investments, there is still a profound
lack of deployed interoperability between healthcare systems and services delivering healthcare and a need to stimulate the public procurement of eHealth solutions and integrated care services addressing complex organisational structures and interactions among
people (recipients of care, care-givers, and others).
Scope:
Proposals should address as primary aim public procurement of innovative solutions (PPI) to facilitate the deployment of an eHealth infrastructure taking into consideration the European
eHealth Interoperability Framework and EU guidelines adopted by the eHealth Network. The PPI(s), and any accompanying innovation activities in particular by participating procurers themselves to facilitate the uptake of newly developed solutions, should focus
on clear target outcomes such as allowing the sharing of health information, the use of semantically interoperable Electronic Health Records (EHRs) for safety alerts, decision support, care pathways or care coordination. The scope of the PPI(s) is to specify,
purchase and deploy innovative ICT based solutions which can deliver sustainable, new or improved healthcare services across organisational boundaries while implementing eHealth interoperability standards and/or specifications (e.g. EN13606, HL7, Continua
Alliance, IHE...).
The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU of between EUR 3 and 4 million would allow this specific challenge to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless,
this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.
Expected Impact:
·
Wider uptake of eHealth interoperability standards
·
Increased suppliers opportunities from wider market uptake of innovative solutions and services by forming a critical mass on the public demand side
·
Better solutions specifications designed from a demand side perspective
·
More forward-looking, concerted, public sector approach to eHealth interoperability
·
Achieve the wider deployment of eHealth services
·
Create a European role model in the eHealth interoperability field
·
Increasing jobs in health and ICT and contributing to economic growth in the EU in the long-term
·
Support forward looking, concerted public-sector investment strategies that benefit from jointly implementing PPIs across different countries around
Europe
On Wed, Apr 6, 2016 at 7:52 PM, Aymond, Patti <Patti.Aymond@iem.com> wrote:
João,
Yes, please do keep me abreast of your progress. I look forward to seeing your next steps.
Patti
Patti Iles Aymond, PhD
Senior Scientist, Research & Development
IEM
8710 Jefferson Highway
Baton Rouge, LA 70809
(225) 526-8844 (voice and fax)
From: João Moreira (UTwente) [mailto:j.luizrebelomoreira@utwente.nl]
Sent: Wednesday, April 06, 2016 4:55 AM
To: Aymond, Patti
Cc: Elysa Jones (elysajones@yahoo.com);
rexb@starbourne.com
Subject: Re: EDXL-TEP: questions for a literature review and contact
Hi Patti,
Thanks very much for the suggestions for our paper, it was very kind from your part! :) Thanks also for forwarding to Elysa Jones and Rex Brooks, it would be very nice to receive
feedback from them too.
Regarding the issue related to the terms "situation", "incident" and "event" (item 7), I totally comprehend the practical reason on having them as synonymous in the specifications
because of the different uses in the field. However, I think that these different uses can lead to ambiguities on describing "what's going on". Moreover, I've been studying the concepts of situation and event, especially the theories of Barwise and Perry (the
Situation theory in logics, from 80s) and Endsley theory (Situation-Awareness in human factors, from 90s). In matter of facts, my supervisor Patricia (who was supervised by my other supervisors) had her PhD (2007) about the concept of situation and she sill
works on this, now focused in CEP (a curiosity: in the CEP community the misunderstanding regarding situation and event concepts also occurs). In addition, I've been working with foundational ontologies from the community of formal ontology, especially the
NEMO group (http://nemo.inf.ufes.br/), which has strong roots from LOA (http://www.loa.istc.cnr.it/).
Regarding the solution I'm proposing, my idea is not to change the EDXL specifications, but use its capabilities to accomodate the differences and explicit the causal relations
between a situation and events. For example, according to WHO, a patitent changes from the situation of "having ILI" to "having SARI" if he/she receives a "recommendation for hospitalization from a doctor" (an event). Therefore, from our ontological language
(OntoUML) and the situation language (SML), a designer could model this change and the ontological model-driven transformations would generate EDXL messages, something like this:
This is only an initial work and I'd like to keep working in this direction for my PhD thesis. And despite of this, I also agree with you (and I'm considering in our approach) about
the use of ontologies for a "controlled vocabulary" for the value sets, as a common understanding mechanism to align the terminology of different value lists. I'm working on the modelling tool to enable our approach and I'd be glad to demonstrate to you in
practice when it is ready (I think on July). What do you think?
Kind regards,
João
PS: Sure, I can change the acknowledgement as you described. As soon as I have the "camera ready" version I'll send it to you.
On Tue, Apr 5, 2016 at 9:38 PM, Aymond, Patti <Patti.Aymond@iem.com> wrote:
João,
Congratulations on the acceptance of your paper by the I-ESA conference. I forwarded your paper to
Elysa Jones, the OASIS Emergency Management Technical Committee Chair, and to Rex Brooks, the OASIS Emergency Management Adoption Technical Committee Chair and a leading semantic interoperability expert. I am cc-ing them here in case they would like to provide
feedback on your paper. I have a few suggestions for your consideration:
1.
Abstract
a.
The acronym ICT is used without being defined.
2.
Key words:
a.
I recommend adding EDXL as a key word.
3.
Abstract; 1. Introduction, paragraph 3; 3.2 Framework Architecture, paragraph 3
a.
There is no formal mechanism in place to verify EDXL compliance. I suggest you use the word “conformance” instead.
4.
1. Introduction, paragraph 1
a.
Preparedness is more than gearing up for response to an impending event. Some preparedness activities are long-term mitigation strategies. I suggest a rewording to something
like “The aim of the preparedness phase is to preposition resources for a disaster before it occurs.”
5.
2.3 Data exchanging standards, paragraph 2
a.
Not all of the EDXL publications that you cite are standards. Some are committee specifications. I suggest changing “standards” to “specifications” in this paragraph.
b.
An important thing worth mentioning is that EDXL-DE is a message envelope that facilitates message routing, including context-sensitive routing. EDXL-DE payloads (one or
more) can be any EDXL message type, XML type, or specified mime-type. Both the EDXL-TEP and the EDXL-HAVE specifications require a EDXL-DE enveloper or a distribution wrapper that conforms to the EDXL-DE.
6.
2.3 Data exchanging standards, paragraph 3
a.
HL7 is the most commonly used hospital standard, not the most commonly used standard. I recommend the follow rewording: “The Health Level 7 (HL7) set of standards (www.hl7.org)
is recognized as the most commonly used hospital messaging standard.”
7.
2.4 Semantic interoperability, paragraph 3
a.
It is worth noting that the reason that “Situations”, “Incidents”, and “Events” are all referred to as “incidents” in the EDXL suite of standards is because the overloaded
use of these terms by different domains. For example, in emergency management, and event may refer to a large-scale situation, such as a hurricane. In local response, an event may refer to a small-scale situation, such as a particular vehicle crash. In a hospital,
an event refers to a very small situation, such as a vital sign reading, administering of a pharmaceutical, or the performance of a diagnostic test. The use of the single “incidents” indicator is to circumvent ambiguity in the use of these terms across domains.
b.
What I think is actually a more substantive goal for semantic interoperability is to establish the use-case nomenclature of the sets of elements that have configurable value
sets (e.g., value lists).
8.
3.1 Proposed approach, paragraph 1
a.
The acronym SA is used prior to definition.
9.
3.2 Framework architecture
a.
The acronym BPMN is used prior to definition.
b.
The acronym BPM is used prior to definition
10.
4. Conclusions, paragraph 1
a.
Again, the use of the “incident” nomenclature is used to resolve ambiguities across domains rather than introduce ambiguity within a single domain application.
I appreciate your acknowledgement of my contribution to your efforts. If you don’t mind, I would
like the acknowledgement to include my employer. Maybe something like this:
…”and to Patti Iles Aymond, integrant of the OASIS Emergency Management Technical Committee (www.oasis-open.org/committees/emergency)
and Senior Scientist with IEM (www.iem.com).
Patti
Patti Iles Aymond, PhD
Senior Scientist, Research & Development
IEM
8710 Jefferson Highway
Baton Rouge, LA 70809
(225) 526-8844 (voice and fax)
From: João Moreira (UTwente) [mailto:j.luizrebelomoreira@utwente.nl]
Sent: Tuesday, March 29, 2016 2:47 PM
To: Aymond, Patti
Subject: Re: EDXL-TEP: questions for a literature review and contact
Hi Patti,
Thanks for all the support until now and sorry for the late response.
I had a paper accepted (workshop Big Data Interoperability for Enterprises, I-ESA conference) where I describe this initial work and how I intend to improve semantic interoperability
of EDXL messages by using the framework I'm working on, I'm attaching it here. It is not the camera ready yet (I need to cut 2 pages), I'll send it for you when published in the proceedings. If it is ok for you, I would like to add your name in the acknowledgements
section (it is there already), can I? Thanks.
Best,
João
PS: If you want, we can have a Skype meeting and I present the paper for you.
On Mon, Feb 8, 2016 at 8:46 PM, Aymond, Patti <Patti.Aymond@iem.com> wrote:
João,
You can find the transform mapping at this location (https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/document.php?document_id=57505&wg_abbrev=emergency)
and the TEP 1.1 CS at this location (http://docs.oasis-open.org/emergency/edxl-tep/v1.1/edxl-tep-v1.1.pdf).
We usually use EA for capturing the data model.
Sorry, but I don’t have much of a window in to the implementation world. One place you may want to
take a look is the MITRE’s EDXL Sharp library. I don’t think they’ve implemented EDXL-TEP, yet, (I could be wrong), but you may get some valuable information/insights from the user community.
Patti
Patti Iles Aymond, PhD
Senior Scientist, Research & Development
IEM
8710 Jefferson Highway
Baton Rouge, LA 70809
(225) 526-8844 (voice and fax)
From: João Moreira (UTwente) [mailto:j.luizrebelomoreira@utwente.nl]
Sent: Tuesday, January 26, 2016 7:37 AM
To: Aymond, Patti
Cc: grapesco@outlook.com
Subject: Re: EDXL-TEP: questions for a literature review and contact
Dear Patti,
Thanks a lot for your responses, they are already useful for my literature review.
Some comments and other questions:
On Thu, Jan 21, 2016 at 8:01 PM, Aymond, Patti <Patti.Aymond@iem.com> wrote:
João,
I am happy to hear that you are taking up this effort, and I look forward to reading your paper.
Below I attempt to provide some useful informatin on the questions that you have posed. Tim has been the driving force behind the EDXL-TEP effort and has worked closely with the stakeholder community for many years, so he may be able to provide additional
insights.
1- What are the main problems and/or challenges and/or open issues in the current version of the
TEP standard that you're working on for the new version?
The EDXL-TEP specification is designed for use by the emergency management and emergency services community in both day-to-day and disaster situations for tracking emergency patients.
The scope of EDXL-TEP messaging is bounded by the hospital or healthare facility. Once a patient is transitioned to a hospital, EDXL-TEP messaging ceases. For many hospitals and healthcare facilities, HL7 is the data structure and messaging standard used.
The OASIS Emergency Management Technical Committee (EM-TC) Tracking of Emergency Patients (TEP) subcommitted (SC) has been collaborating with the HL7 Public Health and Emergency Response (PHER) Working Group (WG) in the development of a mapping between our
two standards, so that hand off of patients in either direction (EM -> Hospital and Hospital -> EM) can be easily accomplished without loss of critical information via HL7/EDXL-TEP transformation. For the new version to be released soon (EDXL-TEP v1.1), the
substantive changes are those needed for successful HL7/EDXL-TEP transformations.
Is it possible to make available this mapping between HL7 and EDXL-TEP (for the transformations)? Even if it is a draft, I'd like to understand in detail what are the possible losses
in information exchanging between them.
A more technical question (as curiosity): what platform are you using for the metamodel and transformations implementation (EMF, ATL, QVT, .NET, EA/MDG)?
2- I read the "Toward Completion and Implementation of a Data Standard for Tracking Emergency Patients (TEP)" resolution and I'd like to know how is the process of harmonizing the standard and why the version 1.0 needs to change?
The HL7/EDXL-TEP transfomration is one very important harmonization effort undertaken to ensure the continuity of health data exchange across the scope of emergency patient movement. The OASIS EM-TC also dialogs with the NEMSIS developers to facilitate harmonization. The only substantive change in the soon-to-be-released EDXL-TEP v1.1 is the addition of a date/time element to the MedicationAdministered element, as required by HL7. In version 1.0, only the medication itself is collected in the MedicationAdministered element.
3- What are the main semantic drawbacks in the current standard? I mean, what parts of the model needed to be adapted somehow to address a specific non-functional requirement (e.g. message exchange performence or length)?
None that I am aware of.
4- Do you know what systems (in production or not) are using TEP (specially from organizations such as WHO and CDC)?
Because OASIS standards are open and freely available for download without any registration requirement, the EM-TC does not have a clear window into what vendors or agencies are currently using our standards. We do get vendor questions from time-to-time and learn of adoption through information exchanges, but I’m afraid that I am not a good source of information on that front. Tim may be able to help you out with that.
Can you provide some examples of issues that the vendors most complain about? Maybe some examples of messages instantiating both formats that semantically should be the same.
And can you list some of those vendors so I can try to contact them to gather more examples and check whether there are more open issues in information exchanging with EDXL compilant
systems?
Looking forward for Tim's feedback! :)
5- Do you have suggestions/recomendations when using TEP in a system?
The OASIS EM-TC works hard to provide specifications that have broad, international applicability. Rather than predefine lists of values that may be applicable in some parts of the globe, but not in others, the EM-TC has adopted an approach of providing the structure for domain users to define and use lists that are applicable to their domain or region. The user community needs to come to agreement on these lists of values and make those lists available via URI for all EDXL-TEP systems to access. There are many ways this can be accomplished, such as vendor collaboration or government agency policy.
This is very intersting and important for my research, is there an initial version of these lists? Ontological approaches have been applied successfully to achieve common understanding.
From a programmer point of view, is there an "implementing framework" (or similar) exposing the EDXL-TEP standard as data contracts in a web service? I mean, like a J2EE (REST)
or .NET (WCF, WebAPI) solution which I can download and "attach" to my system, where my effort would be only in implementing the transformations from my internal data structure to EDXL?
I hope this was helpful. Do no hesitate to reach out if you have additional questions. I will send you a copy of the EDXL-TEP v1.1 and the HL7/EDXL-TEP transform when they are released.
I'll be very apreciated. Thanks a lot for that!
Kind regards,
João
Patti
Patti Iles Aymond, PhD
Senior Scientist, Research & Development
IEM8710 Jefferson Highway
Baton Rouge, LA 70809
(225) 526-8844 (voice and fax)
From: João Moreira (UTwente) [mailto:j.luizrebelomoreira@utwente.nl]
Sent: Monday, January 18, 2016 12:55 PM
To: Aymond, Patti; grapesco@outlook.com
Subject: EDXL-TEP: questions for a literature review and contact
Dear Patti and Timothy,
I'm a PhD student at the University of Twente (Netherlands) - BSc and MSc in computer science - and I've been studying the EDXL standard, especially TEP, HAVE and SitRep. I'm doing a literature review about interoperability problems among emergency management systems, focusing on early warning systems for epidemics detection (disease surveillance, e.g. HealthMap.org). If you're interested, you can find a short overview of my research in:
As part of the literature review, I'd like to ask you some general questions regarding the TEP standard (v.1.0, dec/2013). I'll be very apreciated if you can answer them:
1- What are the main problems and/or challenges and/or open issues in the current version of the TEP standard that you're working on for the new version?
2- I read the "Toward Completion and Implementation of a Data Standard for Tracking Emergency Patients (TEP)" resolution and I'd like to know how is the process of harmonizing the standard and why the version 1.0 needs to change?
3- What are the main semantic drawbacks in the current standard? I mean, what parts of the model needed to be adapted somehow to address a specific non-functional requirement (e.g. message exchange performence or length)?
4- Do you know what systems (in production or not) are using TEP (specially from organizations such as WHO and CDC)?
5- Do you have suggestions/recomendations when using TEP in a system?
For a more detailed description of my research, recently I had this paper published in the journal of Applied Ontology (attached in this e-mail):
Moreira, J. L. R., Ferreira, L., Sinderen, M. Van, & Costa, P. D. (2015). Towards ontology-driven situation-aware disaster management. Applied Ontology, 10(3-4), 339–353. http://doi.org/10.3233/AO-150155
There, I explain the framework based on model-driven engineering that I'm working on with some other students and researchers. The basic idea is to add a transformation process of the situations detected by the "situation-aware" application (formalized by the ontology) to the EDXL message formats, so the broker can expose the situation service following the EDXL standards (being interoperable).
This e-mail is also to get in contact with you and offer any help that I can give, it would be very good for my PhD if I can participate somehow in the construction (or usage) of those standards.
Thanks.
Kind regards,
João Moreira