Technology – Page 2 – HLN Consulting, LLC

HLN Attends Patient Centered CDS Learning Network 2017 Annual Conference

by Noam Arzton October 6, 2017

On October 3, 2017 Noam Arzt and Daryl Chertcoff from HLN attended the Patient Centered Clinical Decision Support Learning Network (PCCDS-LN) 2017 Annual Conference in Crystal City, VA. HLN was also a Bronze-level Sponsor of this event, which brought together clinicians, informaticists, and health policy advocates to discuss current trends in clinical decision support leveraging information from Patient Centered Outcomes Research (PCOR) findings and patient-specific information. The conference featured national experts in CDS and patient-centered research in the morning, and a participative set of breakout sessions in the afternoon developing an idealized design of the patient-centered CDS process through four different perspectives.

Must of this conference focused on patient-centered CDS. But it seems that this term absorbs a number of somewhat different concepts and is used by different people to mean different things. “Patient centered” to some people means “patient-facing” – that is, it refers to an application (in this case a CDS-enabled application) that is used or accessed by a patient directly. To others, patient-centered is synonymous with “patient-empowered” which implies support for more patient control of his or her care and records. Many uses of CDS support do not directly involve patients in real time while still impacting patients and their care.

For HLN’s work in clinical decision support, this conference presented a number of useful themes and raised a number of important issues. While there was a lot of focus at this conference on user interface, it is important for HLN to maintain its focus on the back-end services we are developing (like our ICE Open Source Immunization Forecaster). But it is equally important that we continue to develop a rich set of application programming interfaces (APIs) to our services, including our traditional SOAP-based Web Services, supplemented by various RESTful services (including FHIR, SMART, and CDS Hooks). And all of this work should support and use accepted standards embraced by the healthcare industry.

See article in OpenHealthNews

New Version of HLN’s Award Winning Open Source Immunization Forecaster Released

by Noam Arzton August 1, 2017

A new release (v1.8.1.0) of the Immunization Calculation Engine (ICE) is now available. (Download ICE 1.8.2.0). ICE is a state-of-the-art open-source software system that provides clinical decision support for immunizations (CDSi) for use in Immunization Information Systems (IIS), Electronic Health Record (EHR) and Personal Health Record (PHR) Systems.

The release includes the following changes:

Updates to the Polio Vaccine Group and the Meningococcal ACWY Vaccine Group to better reflect latest guidelines, and addition of Influenza vaccine (CVX 185 and 186) to the Influenza Vaccine Group.
Combines PCV and PPSV vaccine groups into one, new vaccine group for Pneumococcal. This change was made to better account for shots administered across the patient’s lifetime. (To support this new Pneumococcal vaccine group, implementers may need to make adjustments to stop looking for the old PCV and PPSV vaccine group codes (700 and 720), and start looking for the new vaccine group code (750). Child and adult pneumococcal vaccinations are now evaluated and forecast under this new vaccine group. The PCV and PPSV vaccine groups are no longer supported.)
Release notes which describe the above changes to the vaccine group logic in more detail.

Implementers should refer to the new ICE Implementation Guide (v2r15) when making adjustments to be compatible with this latest release, including the new Pneumococcal vaccine group as well as a few other vaccine and evaluation reason codes that have been added. (A “track changes” version of the guide is also available to make it easy to see what has changed since the last release.)

You can determine which release of ICE you are using by viewing the README.HISTORY file that is included with each distribution.

Please feel free to e-mail us at ice@hln.com if you have any questions.

See press release.

HLN Presents at 2017 OSEHRA Summit

by Noam Arzton June 23, 2017

On June 13, 2017, Michael Suralik, project manager at HLN, co-presented with Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) colleagues in a session titled “Update on the Immunization Project Workgroup” at the 2017 Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance (OSEHRA) Summit. Mike discussed HLN’s continuing work with VA on implementing our ICE Open Source Forecaster with VistA, the current EHR system used by VA.

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?