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• HL7 INFOBUTTON TO ENHANCE PATIENT ENGAGEMENT & DECISION SUPPORT

  Posted by CitiusTech Interoperability Practice on Sep 28, 2012

  With the MU2 guidelines laying strong emphasis on patient engagement and decision support, we thought it would be good to have a relook at the Health Level 7 (HL7) International Context Aware Knowledge Retrieval Standard, commonly known as the HL7 Infobutton, which has been prescribed as a functional standard for context-sensitive functionalities such as patient-specific education resources and referential decision support.

   

  

   

  HL7 Infobutton has been around for over 5 years now with significant adoption. The last couple of years have seen a greater number of use cases around the Infobutton. E.g. Evidence-based information resources provided to patients through clinician controlled devices as "information prescriptions” for fostering self-management.

   

  MU2 provides following implementation specifications for HL7 Infobutton:

   

  HL7 V3 Standard	Context-Aware Retrieval Application (Infobutton), Release 1
  HL7 V3 Implementation Guide (option 1)	URL-Based Implementations of the Context-Aware Information Retrieval (Infobutton) Domain, Release 3
  HL7 V3 Implementation Guide (option 2)	Context-Aware Knowledge Retrieval (Infobutton) Service-Oriented Architecture Implementation Guide, Release 1

   

  The challenge today for HIT vendors is that, although HL7 Infobutton is widely adopted, it still involves significant custom integration with content providers. In addition to implementation guides, it needs a common implementation profile, such as the IHE Retrieve Clinical Knowledge (RCK) to make it a truly interoperable standard.