Healthcare Software

Mapping HL7 PHM to Healthvault

Sean Nolan from Microsoft had a post not long ago that states the hard part in patient records is collecting complete and accurate data in the first place. In fact, he says, which standard is used, whether CCR, CCD or some other, is the easy part, and in fact we should probably use all of them.

Overall I agree - mappings for these standards are quite straightforward and can be accomplished in a short amount of time.

To prove it, in under an hour I've mapped the most important elements of the HL7 PHM standard used by Continua to Healthvault (following a similar format to the Healthvault/CCR mapping that Microsoft has published). A developer could probably finish the details and put it into an XSLT in about a day.

Vital Signs HL7 states that measures of "blood pressure, temperature, O2 saturation, respiratory rate, pulse" should be recorded under Vital Signs observation sections, but even PHM Results sections map nicely to Healthvault's vital-signs table.

Check it out below...

Exporting Google Health information to CCR and CCD

A blog post by David Kibbe mentions a tool that allows the exporting of a Google Health profile into CCR or CCD xml formats. The tool is called CCR dashboard.

I was intrigued to be able to see a real life example of the two standards based on the same data.

Linking the tool to a google account is easy, it just requires account credentials and to explicitly grant google permission to share your information.

It worked well for the CCR document but the only problem I came across was when exporting to a CCD xml format at which point I got a nice "XML file cannot be displayed" and I wasn't given the ability to save the file to investigate why.

The workaround was to view the page source and then save it which gave me the XML content I needed. To actually be able to view the xml in an editor however, I also had to change the UTF encoding from encoding="utf-16" to encoding="utf-8".

Next, it would be great if the authors of CCR Dashboard considered implementing the ability to export to the HL7 PHM format, one of the Continua-recommended standards for self-monitoring devices. We even got the mapping started for them!