Ticking away the moments that make up the health record

For the purposes of illustrating precision in HL7v3 Time elements (TS), no time zone information is represented. As a nice bonus, this format is easily sortable as Strings or char arrays.

HL7 TS	Meaning
20121031235959001	October 31, 2012, 999 milliseconds before midnight
20121031235959	October 31, 2012, one second before midnight
201210312359	...and again one minute before midnight
20121031	Any time on the day of October 31, 2012
201210	October 1-31, 2012
20121	October 1 - December 31, 2012 (technically valid, but never used this way)
2012	January 1 - December 31, 2012
20	Sometime in the 21st century

Get it? It's a regular expression with assumed wildcard at the end.

Sketches of mHealth Standards

A June blog post by Keith Boone (aka @motorcycleguy), Convergence: CEDD, CIMI, IHE, FHIR, hData, HL7, mHealth and ONC got me thinking and sketching this simple diagram of how some of those pieces can fit together. 

It's more stream of consciousness than companion diagram, but there it is. A REST client/server wrapped in consent rules wrapped in security protocols (only client side shown), treating health information as RESTful resources. A URI for each patient, document, and fragment. 

The other thing that stuck out to me is the fact that we need data structures which can be use by both simple clients and highly complex ones. Where a mobile app may be reading and writing a half dozen data poings per entry, an industrial strength medical information system may be processing hundreds, and yet they operate on the same record. That's the essence of the CDA XML to hData JSON downshift, to allow interoperability between devices of vastly different capability.