OMG, and HL7 Announce Strategic Collaboration on Software Standards in Healthcare

Business Wire, Sept 17, 2004

NEEDHAM, Mass. -- The Object Management Group(TM) (OMG(TM)) and Health Level Seven today announced a strategic collaboration to develop software standards in the healthcare industry. OMG and HL7 will work together on electronic healthcare standards, including electronic drug prescribing, and patient record interoperability infrastructure.

"This agreement is a landmark in healthcare standards," said Richard Mark Soley, Ph.D., Chairman and CEO of the Object Management Group, Inc. "HL7's Reference Implementation Model is a critical component in standards necessary for electronic healthcare systems interoperability and both leverages OMG's Model Driven Architecture and forms the basis for OMG's own healthcare service specifications, and this strategic relationship will ensure the rapid development and deployment of standards to lower healthcare systems interoperability costs while increasing safety."

OMG's role in the collaboration will be to leverage its expertise with the Unified Modeling Language(TM) (UML(TM)) along with its Model Driven Architecture(R) (MDA(R)) in order to support interoperability in verticals which in this case is Healthcare. To make this happen, the OMG Healthcare Domain Task Force, chaired by David Harrington of MedicAlert Foundation, will continue meeting and begin to cultivate a relationship between OMG and HL7, the world's leading healthcare-specific standards organization. The relationship is critical as OMG will rely on HL7's Reference Information Model (RIM) and HL7's Development Framework (HDF) for OMG's service standards. HL7 already incorporates OMG's UML expertise to implement their RIM and it's associated methodologies (HDF) to develop standard information models (with formal bindings to standard terminologies) for healthcare and healthcare related domains including healthcare-related administrative, financial and research areas.

"OMG and HL7 are prepared to embrace a standard for the EHR that improves patient safety and helps to save lives," said David Harrington, chair of OMG's Healthcare Domain Task Force. "These standards include the ability for all participating entities to identify and authenticate appropriate requests for information, and ensures that existing departmental and other legacy systems do not have to be replaced.

"HL7 is pleased to collaborate with OMG in the creation of such standards, and also to further leverage OMG's Universal Modeling Language (UML) in HL7's methodology and tools," said HL7 Board Chair Mark Shafarman. "HL7 has used, and will continue to use UML as a key foundation element of our methodology for creating standard information models, bound to standard vocabularies, in support of semantic interoperability of healthcare and healthcare related information across the industry's many information domains and applications."

HL7's mission is to provide reliable standards for the exchange, management and integration of data that support clinical patient care and the management, delivery and evaluation of healthcare services. HL7 encourages the creation of flexible, cost-effective approaches, standards, guidelines, methodologies, and related services for the interoperability between healthcare information systems. HL7 also provides a forum for the effective and efficient communication between the constituents of the healthcare community as represented by its membership: an international community of healthcare organizations, vendors and developers of healthcare information systems, consultants and systems integrators, and related public and private healthcare service agencies. Recognizing that complementary efforts are underway to create and extend comprehensive standards in the healthcare community, HL7 has entered into an agreement with OMG to further these goals.

About The OMG

With well-established standards covering software from design and development, through deployment and maintenance, and extending to evolution to future platforms, the Object Management Group (OMG) supports a full-lifecycle approach to enterprise integration which maximizes ROI, the key to successful IT. OMG's standards cover multiple operating systems, programming languages, middleware and networking infrastructures, and software development environments. OMG's Modeling standards, the basis for the MDA, include the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and Common Warehouse Metamodel (CWM). CORBA, the Common Object Request Broker Architecture, is OMG's standard open platform with hundreds of millions of deployments running today.

Headquartered in Needham, MA, USA, with a U.S. government representative in Washington, DC, and international marketing representatives in Japan and Germany, the Object Management Group is an international, open membership, not-for-profit computer industry specifications consortium. OMG member companies write, adopt, and maintain the organization's standards following a mature, open process. All current OMG specifications may be downloaded without charge from the organization's website, www.omg.org; the site also provides additional information about OMG and its activities. For information on joining the OMG, or questions not addressed on the website, please contact OMG headquarters by email at info@omg.org, by phone at 1-781-444 0404, or by fax at 1-781-444 0320.