Joint Development Effort by OMG and HL7 Leads to Initiation of Two New Healthcare SOA Standards.

Requests for Proposals Issued by OMG after 12 months of joint development work with HL7

NEEDHAM, Mass. -- Members of the Object Management Group's[TM] Healthcare Domain Task Force (HDTF), after 12 months of joint development work with Health Level Seven (HL7), have issued two Requests for Proposals (RFP) for proposed standards and are seeking input and participation from the healthcare vendor community. The RFPs are publicly available at: http://www.omg.org/cgi-bin/doc?health/2006-12-01 and at http://www.omg.org/cgi-bin/doc?health/2006-12-02. Organizations interested in the collaboration may visit the project Wiki at http://hssp.wikispaces.com for contact information and recent developments.

The OMG Healthcare DTF is actively working with the Health Level Seven (HL7) Standards Group in producing industry healthcare SOA standards under the Healthcare Services Specification Project (HSSP) joint initiative.

"This effort demonstrates that two standards groups can effectively collaborate and overcome differences in membership, cost, and intellectual property models," according to Ken Rubin, chair of the OMG Healthcare DTF and a Healthcare Architect at EDS. "HSSP is relentlessly focused on delivering business value and being responsive to marketplace-driven healthcare interoperability need."

"HSSP has successfully demonstrated a model of cooperation between SDOs," said Alan Honey, co-chair of HL7's Services Oriented Architecture Special Interest Group and an Enterprise Architect at Kaiser-Permanente. "These initial services start to lay a foundation for service-based interoperability in healthcare."

OMG members initiate the standards process by issuing a Request for Proposals (RFP). The HSSP project is unique in that the RFPs that have been issued are a product of the OMG community's technical refinement of needs expressed in the balloted HL7 Service Functional Models. The OMG process welcomes any company, organization, or government agency interested in participating to join OMG and submit a draft proposal in response to an RFP. The RFPs issued by the Healthcare DTF in December 2006 include:

-- Healthcare: Entity Identification Service (EIS)
   The EIS RFP requests standardization of a set of service interfaces
   to uniquely identify various kinds of entities relevant to health
   care, such as patients, providers, and devices, while not limiting
   the utility of the service to any specific entities. EIS requires
   submissions to be flexible enough to grow and adapt to changing
   market sector needs. The EIS RFP is soliciting solutions capable of
   meeting the challenges faced both within a single enterprise and/or
   across collaborating enterprises. These interfaces were derived
   from the Health Level Seven (HL7) EIS Service Functional Model
   (SFM).

-- Healthcare: Retrieve, Locate, and Update Service (RLUS)
   Healthcare information and resources are fragmented across multiple
   locations and organizations making resource retrieval, location,
   and updating a challenge. To better understand and scope this
   problem space, Health Level Seven (HL7) has produced a Draft
   Standard for Trial Use describing a set of business needs and
   capabilities to address this problem space, which forms the basis
   for the OMG RFP. This RFP asks for interface specifications that
   realize RLUS.

   "RLUS supplies the functional foundation and serves as an
   organizing principle for rich semantic-oriented services in a SOA.
   It is helping to provide the Healthcare IT industry an important
   bridge between legacy message-based applications and model-driven
   information-based architectures," said John Koisch, RLUS
   Specification Chief Editor and VA Application Architect.

Organizations interested in submitting to either RFP should visit the HSSP Wiki at http://hssp.wikispaces.com.

About HL7

Founded in 1987, Health Level Seven, Inc. (www.HL7.org) is a not-for-profit, ANSI-accredited standards developing organization dedicated to providing a comprehensive framework and related standards for the exchange, integration, sharing, and retrieval of electronic health information that supports clinical practice and the management, delivery and evaluation of health services. HL7's more than 2,400 members represent approximately 500 corporate members, including 90 percent of the largest information systems vendors serving healthcare.

HL7's endeavors are sponsored, in part, by the support of its benefactors: Accenture; Booz Allen Hamilton, Boston Scientific Corporation, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI); Eclipsys Corporation; Eli Lilly & Company; Epic Systems Corporation; the Food and Drug Administration; GE Healthcare Information Technologies; GlaxoSmithKline; IBM; Intel Corporation; InterSystems Corporation; Kaiser Permanente; McKesson Provider Technologies; Microsoft Corporation; Misys Healthcare Systems; NHS Connecting for Health; NICTIZ National Healthcare; Novartis; Oracle Corporation; Partners HealthCare System, Inc.; Pfizer, Inc.; Philips Medical Systems; QuadraMed Corporation; Quest Diagnostics Inc.; Science Applications International Corporation; Siemens Medical Solutions Health Services; Solucient, LLC.; St. Jude Medical; the U.S. Department of Defense, Military Health System; the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs; and Wyeth Pharmaceuticals.

International affiliates have also been established in 26 countries throughout the globe including Argentina, Brazil, Canada, China, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, United Kingdom, and Uruguay.

About the Object Management Group

OMG is an international, open membership, not-for-profit computer industry consortium. OMG Task Forces develop enterprise integration standards for a wide range of technologies, including: Real-time, Embedded and Specialized Systems, Analysis & Design, Architecture-Driven Modernization and Middleware and an even wider range of industries, including: Business Modeling and Integration, C4I, Finance, Government, Healthcare, Legal Compliance, Life Sciences Research, Manufacturing Technology, Robotics, Software-Based Communications and Space.

OMG's modeling standards, including the Unified Modeling Language[TM] (UML[R]) and Model Driven Architecture[R] (MDA[R]), enable powerful visual design, execution and maintenance of software and other processes, including IT Systems Modeling and Business Process Management. OMG's middleware standards and profiles are based on the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA[R]) and support a wide variety of industries.

More information about OMG can be found at www.omg.org. OMG is headquartered in Needham, MA, USA.

Note to editors: MDA, Model Driven Architecture, OMG Logo, UML, UML logo and CORBA are registered trademarks, and OMG, Object Management Group, MOF, MDA Logos, OMG SysML and Unified Modeling Language are trademarks, of Object Management Group. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.