ConCall-20070227

T3F - Transitional Technical Task Force

Tuesday Feb 27, 2007 12:00 PM (US Eastern Time, GMT -5)

Present

Beeler, Case, McCaslin, McCay, Lorenzi, Parker

Accepted Agenda

1. (05 min) Roll Call & Accept agenda
2. (50 min) Technical Directorate Discussions

   (40 min) TD Sub-groups Names and Composition

   (10 min) Review changes to TD Charts and list of responsibilities

3. (05 min) Next Steps

Other Business

• T3F Monthly Progress report is due tomorrow. Beeler will submit this and copy to the T3F.
• Approved minutes of last week's meeting

TD Sub-groups Names and Composition

Background

As a starting point for this discussion, the T3F used a previously developed Strategic Initiative document titled "Creation of the Transitional Technical Task Force (T3F)". This document from November 2005 included a summary of the committees to be organized and coordinated by the the TD.

The objective of this T3F meeting is to refine and resolve our understanding of what the structure represents, where we think alternate committee assignments might be made and where we feel this structure may cause "problems" in the future.

The findings and outcome of this meeting have not been formally adopted. We agreed to document the outcome of the discussions and then to re-visit this in the next meeting or so. (This strategy is also being followed with regards to the composition and function of the TD itself.)

Organizing Principle

During the discussions today, the T3F made the following observations:

• HL7 members join committees because of their personal (or corporate) interest in the subject matter content of the committee, regardless of whether their interest stems from academic, development or implementation activities.
• The original break-out of committees (provided in the SI document) aggregates the committees by commonality of what they produce and the relationship of that work product to the other Working Group committees. There was a consensus expressed that this is a sound approach.
• One of the key activities of the TD will be to identify and reduce those places where committees are "stepping on each others toes" or "reinventing the wheel" Coordination within the proposed sub-groups will facilitate this activity.
• The existing relationship between TCs and SIGs may need to be "re-thought", because this strategy will clearly place a number of SIGS in a sub-group that is different from that to which their current "parent TC" is assigned.
• It will be important to not disrupt existing collaboration while establishing this organization, and it is clear that many topics will be managed, in "matrix fashion" between committees in two or three sub-groups.
• A number of committees clearly produce products that fit in two or even three of the sub-groups. This will undoubtedly cause the TD to consider whether to recommend that these groups be split.

Sub-group Definition and Composition

The remainder of these minutes reflect changes to that portion of the original document that divided the existing TCs and SIGs into three groups for the purposes of nominating and electing the representatives to the T3F and listed the "Other committees" to be considered.

Foundation & Technologies

Committees and projects in this space focus on providing the fundamental tools and building blocks that other Committees can use to build the standards.

• Conformance and Implementation
• Infrastructure & Messaging
• Implementable Technology Specifications (ITS)
• Java
• Modeling & Methodology
• Security
• Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
• Templates
• Tooling Committee
• Vocabulary

• Related multi-committee projects:
  • Dynamic Model
  • Harmonization
  • HL7 Terminfo

Direct Support

These committees are currently Board-appointed. They are, for the most part functioning on volunteer effort, although each has strong support from a designated staff liaison. The primary feature of these committees is that their projects provide direct support to the other committees of the Working Group that enables the remaining committees to function efficiently.

• Publishing
• Tooling
• Education
• Electronic Services

Structure & Semantic Design

Committees and project in this space focus on creation of basic patterns and common messages that could exist on their own, but are mostly used by others.

• CCOW

  CCOW is both a foundation (component architecture) and a pattern - the resulting functions

• Clinical Decision Support
• Electronic Health Record (EHR)
• Financial Management
• Genomics
• Orders & Observations
• Patient Administration
• Personnel Management
• Scheduling & Logistics
• Structured Documents

  This committee is a mix of all three sub-groups. CDA-R2 is both a technology and a pattern, and the "implementation" guide work is Domain Expert effort

• Related multi-committee projects:
  • Clinical Statements
  • Common Message Element Types (CMETs)

Domain Experts

Committees and projects in this space focus on creation of messages, services, documents using many of the common structures in place, yet expanding it in key areas as well.

• Anatomic Pathology
• Anesthesiology
• Attachments
• Cardiology
• Clinical Guidelines
• Community Based Health Services
• Emergency Care
• Government Projects

  In similar fashion to OCCR (below). this group fosters participation and development, but does it actually do development?

• Health Care Devices
• Imaging Integration
• Laboratory
• Patient Care
• Patient Safety
• Pediatrics Data Standards
• Public Health Emergency Response (PHER)
• Pharmacy
• Regulated Clinical Research Information Management (RCRIM)

  Is not this group doing patterns?

Other

Additionally there are these Board-appointed committees:

• Architecture Review Board (ARB)

  As noted in last week's discussion, this becomes a direct responsibility of TD

• Outreach Committee for Clinical Research (OCCR)

  Although it fosters participation and development, this group does not actually do development

• Process Improvement

  This becomes a direct responsibility of TD