NHIN CONNECT (US healthcare data exchange mechanism) and Semantic Data

quick note for the interested.

Just finished up at the NHIN CONNECT meeting in Miami and
terminology/concept mapping and exchanging structured health data, rather
than just unstructured documents, are definitely in play now. The DoD and
others discussed their work at some length (I showed off our VeganVet
demo<http://www.caregraf.org/veganvet/demo>).


Background:
NHIN CONNECT <http://www.connectopensource.org/>, NIH's open source project
that is building a gateway for putting health records onto the "NHIN" - the
national health information network. Basically, a piece of software that
makes it legal to exchange health data more widely. The group's setup along
to the lines of the Apache project - in fact, Brian
Berendorf<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Behlendorf>is the
resident guru. The focus is code, not specs.

The CONNECT gateway implements all the legalities of exchange - security,
exchanging credentials. An institution just needs to write an adapter to
accept queries like "give me patient x's document" or "do you know about
patient x". This is based around a document motif but other approaches are
being looked at in the new NHIN DIRECT <http://nhindirect.org/> subgroup.

Conor