Annoucement: Operation Jumpstart
Title: Annoucement: Operation Jumpstart
Author: Liora Alschuler <liora@the-word-electric.com>
Date: Wed, 25 Jun 1997 16:01:07 -0400
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Following is the first public announcement of a project that will take
place shortly at a meeting in the Lakes District of New Hampshire. The
participants in what we have dubbed "Operation Jumpstart" welcome your
input and suggestions on the issues that are central to an industry-wide
SGML/XML implementation for medical information. Queries and discussions
for the group should be addressed to the HL7 SGML listserv, but will
also be welcomed on comp.text.sgml (or any other forum of which we are
made aware!). A list of participants and the listserv address are given
below.
It is our hope that the time and resources devoted to "Operation
Jumpstart" will contribute to the effort to implement standards for use
of structured information -- SGML and XML -- in healthcare information
systems. If successful, our work will be a point of departure for
subsequent work by a much wider range of participants that will yield
truly flexible, extensible, and interoperable medical information
systems based on open standards.
Liora Alschuler, Project Manager, Operation Jumpstart
East Thetford, Vermont, June 25, 1997
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OPERATION JUMPSTART
Operation Jumpstart refers to a privately-funded effort of medical
practitioners, informatics specialists, medical technology vendors, and
HL7 and SGML consultants who will meet July 7-11 to create an initial
draft of an SGML standard architecture for healthcare.
MISSION
To develop a simple, focused reference architecture useful in both
exchange systems and persistent storage. This architecture, along with
reference code and examples, will be released into the public domain
under copyright control of the HL7 SGML SIG
[http://www.mcis.duke.edu/standards/HL7/committees/sgml/] which will
have the option to extend and expand it in accordance with the Mission
and goals of that group.
DELIVERABLES:
At the end of one week of intensive effort we will have ready for
testing a set of implementable, extensible DTDs for 1) the basic
doctor/patient encounter, 2) a single auxiliary area -- anatomic
pathology is the current choice -- and 3) a framework for defining,
tracking, and linking the disparate pieces of the medical record. This
framework is what we call an "architecture" whether it is actually a
formal, HyTime architecture or a design framework that uses another
method to define these relationships.
In addition, we will have sample coded documents that interoperate as a
test suite within a prototype scenario.
All DTDs, sample documents, and sample code (ActiveX, Java or other)
will be made public on the HL7 SGML SIG website shortly after the
Jumpstart meeting concludes, along with documentation describing each
deliverable.
OPERATION JUMPSTART BENEFACTORS:
Operating funds have been provided by:
Sequoia Software, Kaiser Permanente (Southern California), Oceania Inc.,
and Kurzweil Applied Intelligence
Each of the consulting firms engaged for this project have made their
personnel available at substantially reduced rates to underwrite this
not-for-profit activity.
THE HL7 SGML LISTSERV
Join the ListServer:
Send e-mail to majordomo@list.mc.duke.edu, subject unimportant, text
"subscribe sgml-hl7" (without quotes).
Quit the ListServer:
Send e-mail to majordomo@list.mc.duke.edu, subject unimportant, text
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ListServer Address:
Members of the ListServer can post to the list by sending e-mail to
sgml-hl7@list.mc.duke.edu
OPERATION JUMPSTART PARTICIPANTS:
Liora Alschuler liora@the-word-electric.com
Ron Capwell ron@sequoiasw.cm
Bob Dolin Robert.Dolin@kp.org
Dan Essin essin@hsc.usc.edu
Jasen Fici jasen@sequoiasw.com
Lloyd Harding lloyd@bonsai.infoauto.com
Eliot Kimber eliot@isogen.com
Randy Marbach randall.e.marbach@kp.org
John Mattison john.e.mattison@kp.org
Jon Morris jmorris@Oceania.com
Anil Sethi anil@sequoiasw.com
Rachael Sokolowski rachaels@kurzweil.com
John Spinosa spinosaj@scripps.edu
Michael Toback mtoback@Oceania.com
Jason Williams jwilliams@oceania.com
Bios for some of the participants are provided below:
Liora Alschuler, The Word Electric
Liora Alschuler is a consultant, writer, and trainer specializing in the
application of SGML in technical publishing and medical information. She
is the author of ABCD... SGML: A User's Guide to Structured Information,
International Thomson Computer Press, 1995. She has taught an
introductory course on SGML for the University of Wisconsin, Engineering
Professional Development program, the New York Public Library, and for
private clients. She has been active on the HL7 SGML SIG for the past
year and is Program Chair for the SIG-sponsored HL7 SGML Mixer, July
29-30 in La Jolla, CA, co-sponsored by SGML Open and the GCA:
http://www.mcis.duke.edu/standards/HL7/committees/sgml/#mtg
She has spoken on hypertext and SGML at local, regional, and national
conferences. Her articles have appeared in The Seybold Report
publications, WebWeek, ComputerWorld, , Publish! and other publications.
Liora has a BA in Anthropology from the University of Wisconsin and an
AD in Broadcast Engineering from Milwaukee Area Technical College. She
spent 7 years in broadcast engineering; 2 years as a manufacturing test
engineer in Silicon Valley; and 10 years writing and managing
documentation where she became interested in hypertext and the
opportunities it presented for conveying information.
Ron Capwell, Sequoia Software Corporation
Ron is a Technical Development Lead for Sequoia Software's Databank
Server. Ron also was instrumental in the state wide deployment of
Sequoia's Medstar in the Kaiser of Ohio system. He has experience in
development of massively distributed medical record systems, Intranet
(enterprise) workflow and MPI, and SGML development technologies. Ron
currently is working on a distributed system for the State of Virginia,
utilizing Databank as the Master Index Server for geographically
dispursed records scaling to 40 Terabytes of records data across 10,000
users within the Commonwealth.
Bob Dolin, MD, Kaiser Permanente
Bob Dolin, MD has been a practicing General Internist in Southern
California since 1990. During residency at UCLA, he became interested in
computers, and built an Electronic Health Record for the out patient
clinic. At Kaiser Permanente, Dr. Dolin has been actively involved in
clinical system design and development, participating in patient care
data modeling, IntraNet development, standards implementations, and
Electronic Health Record design. At the National level, Dr. Dolin has
been actively involved in a collaborative effort towards the development
of a comprehensive healthcare terminology, and has been helping to
develop and disseminate standards for the Electronic Health Record and
for the transfer of clinical data between computer systems. He currently
manages the HL7 SGML SIG website.
Jasen Fici, Sequoia Software Corporation
As a developer, Jasen cut his teath as a key member of the Kaiser of
Ohio development team. In his current role as Systems Architect, Jasen
is responsible for architecting Databank's 24x7, "lights out" Healthcare
services, including: SGML based replication and MPI; continuous
availibility; load balancing and load distribution.
Lloyd Harding, Information Assembly Automation, Inc. (IAAI)
MS in Computer Science (Computation Linguistics 1987)
Lexis/Nexis Developed programmatic recognition systems for the
recognition of biographical documents, the markup of proper nouns, and
the markup of the internal structure of free flowing legal documents.
Designed and implemented collection and fabrication systems providing
clients with electronically received data within 10 minutes of receipt
and without human intervention. Promoted adoption of SGML throughout
company infrastructure and processes. Developed internal SGML standards
and data architecture for fabrication, on line search, and delivery.
Information Assembly Automation Inc. In affliation with Martin Hensel
Corporation: Development of DTDs for Genrx, Nursing Drug Reference
(Skidmore), Handbook of Diseases (Langford), Diagnostic and Laboratory
Test Reference (Pagana), and Intravenous Medications (Gahart) Developed
and implemented system for editing, and generation of print and Web
versions of Genrx using micro documents/Sybase for monographs,
suppliers, and product information. Developed and implemented system for
title selection and linking of titles for subsequent multi title product
generation. Each title conforms to a seperate DTD. Developed
editing/workflow system for processing arbitrary DTDs for math and
scientific journals and proces through Miles 33 OASYS typesetting
software. Consulting for Dow Jones and Prodigy online products.
W. EliotKimber, Senior SGML Consultant, Highland Consulting
W. Eliot Kimber is a Senior SGML Consultant with over 13 years
experience with electronic publishing and generic markup. Eliot was one
of the architects of IBM's IBM ID Doc project, with Wayne Wohler and Don
Day. The IBM ID Doc project is an attempt to replace IBM's GML-based
BookMaster markup language and associated processors with an SGML-based
system. Still in the process of being implemented, IBM ID Doc arguably
represents one of the largest single sets of requirements met by a
single, comprehensive SGML application. As a consultant for Passage
Systems, Eliot worked with a variety of enterprises to develop SGML and
HyTime-based solutions to information management and production
problems.
Eliot speaks and writes frequently on the subjects of SGML, HyTime. He
is an active member of the WG8 committee and has been a key contributor
to the development of the HyTime Technical Corrigendum. Eliot is also a
member of the W3C's SGML on the Web Editorial Review Board, charged with
designing the "XML" language, a profile of SGML specifically design for
Web-based delivery of SGML documents.
Anil Sethi, Sequoia Software Corporation
Anil is the Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Sequoia Software
Corporation. Both his undergraduate and graduate work are in Biomedical
Engineering, from CUA and JHU. Anil has 14 years in the Healthcare IT
area, from Hewlett Packard, to medical imaging with Apple Computer.
Rachael Sokolowski, Kurzweil Applied Intelligence
Ms. Sokolowski has developed software applications for fourteen years,
eight years in linguistic, natural language and text processing software
products. Of the many products she has worked on, the best known is
Houghton Mifflin's CorrecText grammar correction and spelling correction
systems in use by Microsoft Word. Additionally, she led the effort to
develop an on line version of the American Heritage Dictionary
structured in SGML. Also while at Houghton Mifflin, Ms. Sokolowski
researched the feasibility of publishing college textbooks and almanacs
from SGML. At Kurzweil, she worked on the design and development of
Kurzweil Clinical Reporter, a structured reporting system, which
involved a port from DOS to Windows and the design of a graphical user
interface using voice.
Today at Kurzweil, she is the principal investigator, system architect,
and project manager of "Open, Voice Enabled, Structured Medical
Information", a two year research grant from the National Institute of
Standards and Technology (NIST) Advanced Technology Program (ATP). Open,
Voice Enabled, Structured Medical Information is an open structured
medical reporting system that produces the encounter notes recorded by
clinicians in SGML and employs CORBA to distribute the data. She is co
principal investigator on the "Physician's Assistant for Continuous
Transcription" a large vocabulary continuous speech system that
electronically transcribes medical data into SGML which is currently
under review.
She is the inventor on two patents: one for parsing text into sentences
and another for performing readability analysis on text. She is the
chair of the Clinical Data Working Group of CORBAmed. CORBAmed is the
Domain Task Force of the Object Management Group (OMG) that is
responsible for *evaluating and recommending standard interfaces for
healthcare objects, to be adopted by the OMG. In January of 1997, Ms.
Sokolowski was elected chair of the Health level 7 (HL7) SGML Special
Interest Group (SIG). The HL7 SGML Initiative is a special interest
group of HL7 formed to create the standard for the use of SGML in all
domains of health care.
John Spinosa, Staff Pathologist and Medical Director
Scripps Memorial Hospital
John practices anatomic and clinical pathology in San Diego, California
and is a member of the College of American Pathologists (CAP)
informatics committee. He represents the CAP at ANSI HISB meetings and
is a CAP voting member to HL7. John has spent much of his professional
life being trained and working in the San Diego area. His exposure to
SGML came via the familiar route of using LaTeX for his doctoral
dissertation and being exposed to very cogent comments on comp.text.tex
about the utility of SGML. When he was considering an academic career,
John explored neutrophil physiology, biochemistry, and the biological
activity of C5a. He has subspecialty training in hematopathology. He
hopes that SGML may provide the basis for solving some of the difficult
problems in medical information interchange.
Undergraduate work at Claremont McKenna College, BA in Chemistry 1980;
UCSD School of Medicine, Combined MD/PhD program, MD 1987, PhD,
Experimental Pathology 1988; Intership in Pathology, UCSD Medical
Center and VA Hospital, 1987-1988; Residency in Pathology, UCSD Medical
Center and VA Hospital, 1988-1991; American Cancer Society Clinical
Fellow in Surgical Pathology and Cytopathology, 1989-1990; Clinical
Fellowship in Hematopathology and Staff Pathologist, Scripps Clinic
Medical Group, 1991-1993; Pathology Medical Group, La Jolla,
California, Staff Pathologist Scripps Memorial Hospital La Jolla, Staff
Pathologist Scripps Memorial Hospital Encintas, Staff Pathologist and
Medical Director, Scripps East County, Medical Director, Pathology
Medical Laboratories, San Diego, Medical Director, Cytometry
Associates, San Diego, 1993-present
Michael Toback, Oceania, Inc.
I am currently a Senior Engineer at Oceania In the Database Engineering
Group. In my time here I have worked extensively outside of engineering
to develop products such as our Web based electronic medical record, a
patient registration module, and a document parsing capability providing
either a proprietary or an SGML representation. I am currently working
on a Clinical Object Server, which will provide access to the objects in
our clinical data repository through either OLE or CORBA interfaces,
including translation of our documents to SGML through several DTDs.
Before this, I spent almost 20 years working for a DoD contractor and a
DOE National Laboratory in various software engineering roles, including
the software integration manager for a large (> $100 M) digital signal
processing project. In several of those positions I worked extensively
on automated document analysis tools to extract test and requirements
information into SQL databases for project tracking and status.
I have a BS Degree in Biomedical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute and a dual MS Degree in Biomedical and Electrical Engineering
from Carnegie Mellon University.
Jason Williams, Oceania, Inc.
I have recently begun working with Oceania as a Clinical Informatics
Analyst where I will be focusing on SGML and other data reporting and
information retrieval issues. Before joining Oceania, I had the
opportunity to work on several SGML projects at the University of
Michigan while I completed my master's degree in information science.