[news.eclipse.technology.ohf] Re: OHF IHE actor implementations

[Sondra Renly <srrenly@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Rob,

Thank you for posting to the newsgroup.

Q1. There is no implementation (simulation) of the IHE actor (e.g., PDQ 
consumer); there is just the mechanisms to talk to it (e.g., create a 
query message). What OHF provides are the mechanisms to interact with 
IHE actors, but not an actual reference implementation of the actor? Is 
this correct? Is it the intent that a user has its own real 
implementation of the IHE actor and OHF provides tools to interact with 
it (to test it)? What we are looking for is the reference 
implementation; do you know if these are available?

A1: The Eclipse OHF project provides tooling for healthcare application 
vendors to quickly implement IHE profiles; thereby driving adoption of 
interoperability in healthcare. It is correct that we do not provide a 
reference implementation application. We do provide the IHE Bridge 
component (which is an implementation exposing web services) as well as 
sample code and junits. As a tool, we supported 10 systems at 
Connectathon 2008.

I am aware of one open source application implementation (uses the IHE 
Bridge component), OpenEMR from Possibility Forge. This group attended 
Connectathon and HIMSS in 2007. They may be open to working with you as 
a reference implementation. Other open source applications are 
considering adding IHE profiles and may be able to help you further down 
the road.


Q2.OHF requires Eclipse plug-ins, how difficult is it to make the code 
standalone? How dependent is the HL7 V2 functionality tied to the 
Eclipse framework? That is, can the HL7 V2 code be directly ran as a 
Java application or library that can be access directly?

A2: OHF committers have intentionally avoided Eclipse framework 
dependencies because our clients, healthcare application vendors, use 
other platforms. The plug-ins can be run directly in Java applications 
or as a library.


Sondra


Rob Snelick wrote:
> We were contemplating incorporating the OHF HL7 V2 actors (e.g., PDQ 
> Consumer) into a larger testing framework. Initially, we thought the OHF 
> actors were ïreference implementationsï of these actors. However, after 
> examining the documentation and code we made the following observations:
> 1. There is no implementation (simulation) of the IHE actor (e.g., PDQ 
> consumer); there is just the mechanisms to talk to it (e.g., create a 
> query message). What OHF provides are the mechanisms to interact with 
> IHE actors, but not an actual reference implementation of the actor? Is 
> this correct? Is it the intent that a user has its own real 
> implementation of the IHE actor and OHF provides tools to interact with 
> it (to test it)? What we are looking for is the reference 
> implementation; do you know if these are available?
> 2.OHF requires Eclipse plug-ins, how difficult is it to make the code 
> standalone? How dependent is the HL7 V2 functionality tied to the 
> Eclipse framework? That is, can the HL7 V2 code be directly ran as a 
> Java application or library that can be access directly?