• Robust Testing Is Required for Reliable Healthcare Interoperability
• Barry Runyon
• 28 October 2014
• Healthcare delivery organizations are evolving to meet new market demands and require that their IT systems interoperate more effectively than ever before. HDO CIOs must rigorously test against standards as the most effective path to reliable interoperability.
  
  
  Key Findings
  • Integration is about making a single vendor's suite of products work together seamlessly and holistically as a system.
  • Interoperability is about achieving similar results among various, often competing, vendor products and IT services – regardless of the product architectures and technologies that they have been built on.
  • While interoperability and integration are not the same – the tools, technologies and standards used to achieve both are often similar.
  • Most healthcare delivery organizations (HDOs) and vendors do not adequately test for interoperability.
  
  
  Recommendations

  HDO CIOs and IT leaders:

  • Assess your vendor's extraenterprise interoperability capabilities to determine if these will satisfy your information- and work-sharing requirements as you evolve to a real-time healthcare system.
  • Ensure your enterprise interface engine or integration platform will support your interoperability requirements and strategic vision.
  • Build adequate time and budget for robust interoperability testing into your system development and implementation plans.
  • Insist that system vendors show proof of independent (third-party) testing and plans for continuous interoperability.
  • Use interoperability and conformance testing services if you are developing applications or interfaces in-house.
  
  
  Analysis
  Introduction
  Healthcare IT systems, whether developed in-house or acquired, must work together as a coherent system of systems to safely deliver on their collective value proposition. It has never been easy to achieve interoperability among healthcare information systems. Most standards have the flexibility to support a wide variety of use cases. For example, almost every U.S. Health Level Seven (HL7) laboratory results interface is different, due to variations in the coding and interpretations of the standard. This problem is not unique to HL7. Read more

Industry Innovation

• Testing as a Shared Service in an Information Sharing Environment
• Are you interested in benefiting from the ROI many organizations are realizing through coupling of Cloud based Infrastructures (IaaS) and Testing Services (TaaS) in a true Shared Services model? Learn more about effective testing for interoperability and standards conformance in an information sharing environment.

• Powerful Results. Delivered.
• AEGIS has become a nationally recognized leader in the development and implementation of critical systems which support the effective and secure exchange of health information. We have a strong group of trained and dedicated specialists with solid technical understanding and expertise in various Health IT related protocols and standards including HITSP, HL7, IEEE, NIST, etc. AEGIS realizes that the pressure to deliver successful software projects continues to grow, particularly when individual projects are part of a larger network, like in healthcare. We provide technology services that help organizations translate their strategic business goals into IT initiatives and solutions that significantly improve performance, solving even the most complex problems. AEGIS is a quality process driven organization, rated Maturity Level 3 in both CMMI-DEV v1.3 and CMMI-SVC+SSD v1.3 as well as ISO 9001:2008 certified.

• Developers Integration Lab
  The AEGIS Developers Integration Lab (DIL) is a cloud-based Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Testing as a Service (TaaS) in a true Shared Services model. The DIL is an open source testing solution for health information exchange gateway, interoperability, and compatibility testing. The DIL provides an easy-to-use system for performing conformance and interoperability tests against published specifications, standards, and profiles, including templates and implementation guides.

• WildFHIR
  We are proud to present AEGIS' reference implementation (RI) of HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR). We have named our RI, "WildFHIR®."
  
  AEGIS has been actively participating in the HL7 Work Group Meetings (WGMs) covering a full range of HL7-specific topics such as Version 2.x Implementation, Version 3, and the Clinical Document Architecture (CDA®), FHIR, Meaningful Use in the US, Electronic Health Records, and Vocabulary Terminology among others. AEGIS has been testing FHIR, developing and publishing test cases within the DIL. AEGIS is working on IHE profiles and NwHIN standards and specifications within the AEGIS Integrated Ecosystem, a synthetic community of Health Care organizations.
  
  As an HL7 Benefactor, AEGIS supports HL7's goal of achieving healthcare interoperability that will lead to better health outcomes and improve security and patient safety.