IHE Testing and Tools Committee Teleconference Minutes 2008-01-07

Attendees

Cor Loef will lead discussion on "Tiger Team" tcon later this afternoon to develop outline; drafting will take place during HL7 meeting, Jan. 7-11
- Draft will be available for committee to review on Jan. 14 or Jan. 21 tcons
- Key question to be resolved in developing business strategy is the extent to which we should rely on existing revenue stream from Connectathon fees vs. pursuing revenue streams from governments and other potential users of tools

Current outline needs to be developed into a text document for review

Language of agreement/commitment to contribute to tools development is the critical section
Chris Carr will provide draft agreement language for review during the Jan. 14 tcon

As reported on previous tcons, IHE and NIST have had positive discussions with CCHIT and their development partner, MITRE Corp, about coordinating work on testing tools
Part of this effort, known as the Laika Project, is supposed to be privately demonstrated in January and demonstrated publicly in February
- Gazelle project team is to be invited to private demonstration
MITRE's contribution would likely be a validation engine for CDA documents; possible that this could be configured to validate documents for specific IHE profiles
CCHIT and IHE developing joint press release about the respective roles of the organizations in testing and certification and about the agreement to cooperate on tools development
Steve Moore will renew discussions with MITRE personnel toward engaging them in Gazelle team design discussions

As previously discussed, OHT is establishing relationships with Canada, UK and Australia to develop open source interoperability testing tools
Dennis Giokas introduced Chris Carr to Skip McGaughey, one of the leaders of the OHT effort; he expressed willingness to discuss cooperative activity
OHT held a board meeting in Novemeber where they identified four projects to move forward on; one of which was coordination of testing activities throughout Canada
- Mike Nusbaum attended meeting, as did Ed Larsen, Dan Russler and other IHE participants
Action Item: Committee's advice is to invite Skip McGaughey to Connectathon Conference and hold a separate discussion meeting with him; Chris Carr will extend invitation

Agreement that we need to formalize touch points for tracking projects that might develop or make use of testing tools similar to the ones being developed by IHE
- HIMSS's EIS Global Enterprise Task Force has developed a spreadsheet of projects that may have useful information and which may be adaptable as a tracking tool for the Testing and Tools Committee's purposes
- Action Item: Mike Nusbaum will forward the EIS spreadsheet to the committee for review
Canada Health Infoway as an example:
- Many dimensions, clusters of activity; not all completed coordinated
- Intention to develop both testing data sets and a test harness
- Longer-term strategy is being developed and should be announced this Spring

David Monteau reported the he will forward a new draft of the IP policy drafting document for discussion on the next teleconference on Jan. 14

Business Plan Tiger Team Tcon: Jan. 7, 2-3pm
- Discuss outline and goals: Chris Carr, Didi Davis, Ed Larsen, Cor Loef, Charles Parisot
Tcon: Jan. 14, 9am CT (Dial-in info in Webex email)
- Agenda:
  - Review draft outline of business plan (if available--Cor Loef will be in transit)
  - Review committee member commitment language (Chris Carr)
  - Review updated IP policy proposal document (David Monteau)
Tcon: Jan. 21, 9am CT
- Agenda tbd