In this Issue HL7 News

HL7 News • ONC Testing Grant Awarded to HL7
Standards Development Organization Collaboration
to Enhance Standards Alignment, Testing and Measurement
ONC Testing Grant Awarded to HL7
While many of our members are aware
of the ONC grant to improve C-CDA
implementation, the ONC also awarded
HL7 with a modest grant to develop
a plan to ensure that conformance
testing is available across its portfolio
of implementation guides (IGs).
Note that the grant deliverable is a plan
and does not include implementation
of the plan. While the grant is modest,
if implemented, it has the potential
to drastically improve and make
implementation easier as conformance
tooling could be developed
concurrently with our standards.
Before applying for the grant, we
spent some time talking with our
CEO Dr. Chuck Jaffe, our then CTO
John Quinn, TSC chair Ken McCaslin,
and Calvin Beebe about an approach
to providing conformance testing
across our portfolio of IGs. Generally,
the group felt that HL7 should not
be in the business of developing
tooling to test conformance to its own
work. Instead, the group agreed that
HL7 should provide conformance
statements within its IGs and
then certify those organizations
wishing to use those statements
to provide conformance testing.
Early on, Dave and I had conference
calls with HL7’s Conformance &
Guidance for Implementation/
Testing (CGIT) Work Group, as
conformance to the standards is
under their purview. We briefly
discussed the grant, its deliverables
and our proposed approach with
CGIT. In turn, they were very helpful
in assisting us with clarifying some
points with ONC and in identifying
information we might wish to collect
relative to the available tooling.
By Karen Van Hentenryck,
HL7 Associate Executive
Director
Dave Hamill, Director
of the HL7 Project
Management Office
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