HLN Consulting, LLC – Software and Services for Public Health

HLN’s ICE Open Source Immunization Forecaster Receives 2017 NVPO Upshot Award

by Noam Arzton June 8, 2017

On June 6, 2017, HLN was awarded the 2017 Upshot Award for Excellence in Vaccine Supply, Access, and Use by the National Vaccine Program Office (NVPO) for its ICE Open Source Immunization Forecaster. In the letter of award, Dr. Jewel Mullen, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health commented that,

HLN Consulting’s efforts on the Immunization Calculation Engine (ICE) are impressive. This powerful tool-including its open-source nature and seamless integration into clinical workflows-holds great promise for improving clinical decision-support and ultimately vaccination rates. Thank you for daring to innovate, collaborate, and lead in an area that is not only complex, but constantly evolving.

Mike Suralik, one of HLN’s project managers, was on hand to receive the award at the meeting of the National Vaccine Advisory Committee in Washington, DC. HLN is pleased to accept this award on behalf of the ICE project. While we have been the lead organization, we consider ICE to be a community effort of interested public health organizations, clinical users, and software developers. This project would not be a success without ongoing cooperation between these participants. ICE is an important product for the immunization community. It is collaboratively developed, maintained, and supported yet is freely available for use. We hope ICE can gain a broad acceptance not only here in the US but across the world.

See press release

CDSi Services and HIPAA

by Noam Arzton May 8, 2017

Clinical Decision Support (CDS) services such as HLN’s Immunization Calculation Engine (ICE) are modular, loosely-coupled components of larger systems accessed via web services in a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Under HIPAA, services provided to Covered Entities (CE) which involve protected health information (PHI) as defined in the statute are subject to the regulation. But are CDS services such as ICE subject to this regulation?

Open Source Software Hosting for Public Health

by Noam Arzton May 8, 2017

Introduction

HLN Consulting, LLC (HLN), a leading public health software application developer, has been at the forefront of Open Source software development, use, and support for public health. This has encompassed both the deployment and support of third-party Open Source products for our clients, and especially the development of new Open Source solutions. Since the vast majority of HLN’s work is government funded, software development activities conducted under “work for hire” agreements with government agencies often leads to public-private collaboration that results in Open Source products.

HLN Presentations from 2017 AIRA National Meeting

by Noam Arzton May 1, 2017

HLN attended the 2017 American Immunization Registry Association (AIRA) National Meeting in Chicago, IL from April 11-13 and presented the following talks:

We encourage you to check out all the excellent presentations delivered at this important meeting.

New PHII Blog: A public health perspective on interoperability

by Noam Arzton April 20, 2017

The Public Health Informatics Institute (PHII) recently published a blog entry written by Dr. Noam Arzt, president of HLN:

A public health perspective on interoperability

We have written previously about interoperability and its increasing important to public health. Yet public health has some specific challenges to making interoperability effective:

There are more than 2,500 public health agencies in the U.S. at the federal, state, local, territorial and tribal levels. This not only leads to great diversity, but as a result public health cannot and does not speak with one voice about interoperability issues (or anything else for that matter). This makes it difficult for some stakeholders to engage public health consistently or to implement solutions that can be used more uniformly and therefore more effectively across public health.

See full blog entry