Medweb creates automatic translation exchange for SA3 providers
After I briefly read some of the current summary report for SA3, I realized that I need to spend more time blogging strong angel and less time at my day job!
I would like to share with you what happened at SA3 regarding the success or failure of standards based data exchange among the various parties that were collecting, sharing, and displaying GIS mapped Patient data information.
First and foremost, we had complete success in the collection, conversion, and display of the data collected from the Red Cross, Medweb satellite van based clinic, Loma Linda University Hospital satellite telemedicine vehicle, and the Army Battlefield medical PDA (BMIST) from TATRC to the half dozen or so vendors of GIS mapped data display systems. This was, however, accomplished using a very dynamic conversion Clearinghouse approach and we were thankful that we brought our programmers to SA3 since in the end, none of the originally selected formats was actually accepted by the GIS vendors. The USNS Mercy was on a mission and unavailable to participate in the exercise as hoped.
Medweb arrived at SA3 prepared to feed GIS mapped data on victims to each of the participants display systems (i.e. Google) in real-time as we acquired information from roving mobile vans and the red cross, along with reformatting several thousand archived Red Cross records to have GIS points in the San Diego Region. We also prepared to receive data by email and hand delivery for upload to the system.
This activity was planned to meet several of the exercise objectives at a meeting held at SDSU with Eric Frost and Steve Price from the SDSU Viz lab representing Strong Angel and the Shadowlite projects , Lois from NIUSR, as well as Steve Cooper and Frank Barker from the American Red Cross.
Medweb already had relationships with the Army Telemedicine advanced technology research center and had created a gateway that converted patient EMR records from the BMIST or battlefield medical EMR that was developed by TATRC. Medweb also had discussed collaboration with the USNS Mercy through the naval telemedicine office at NNMC since Medweb is already aboard the USNS Comfort, Balboa naval Hospital in San Diego, and a variety of other US navy ships.
Public standard protocols were selected to be supported. These included only the following 2 protocols:
• CAP Common alerting protocol (An xml based standard message type used for AMBER ALERTS)
• RSS Really Simple Syndication (Streaming news internet news feed format)
It turned out that NONE of the GIS mapping vendors was prepared to accept any of these standards. Instead, we received numerous requests for a variety of variations on public formats that were supported by the various vendors.
Medweb provided them on the fly as requested through our DMECH or Disaster Management Electronic Clearing House.
• ACCEPTED XML FROM BMIST (Army Battlefield Medical Information system PDA)
• ACCEPTED HL7 FROM MEDWEB TICTAC (Medweb and Loma Linda using the Medweb TICTAC Clinic Server)
• ACCEPTED CSV FROM THE RED CROSS. (Comma Delimited Text Files)
XML= Extensible Markup Language
HL7= Hospital information system level 7 language
We formatted that data into the following standard Formats initially.
• CAP or Common Alerting Protocol (Amber Alert) Microsoft was the only group to use CAP
• RSS or Really Simple Syndication (SSE as an option)
• KML (Google Earth format) – we used that internally for our own Google map of the data
Simultaneous to our participation in the SA3 exercise, we achieved the following:
Exported DATA to the following Formats as requested by vendors in order to have cohesive display to all GIS mapping vendors:
• GML geography markup Language. OpenGIS.net Used by several
• KML Keyhole markup language Google.com Used by Google
• CAP Common Alerting Protocol (see DHS.gov) – Medweb extended the CAP protocol to hold patient data
• RSS Really Simple Syndication – 2 different variants
- GEORSS – GIS mapped RSS (see georss.org)
- RSS GEO (see W3C.org)
• CSV Comma delimited Format – used by INTERGRAPH, ESRI, and Red Cross
Medweb's DMECH (Disaster Management Elctronic Clearinghouse) delivered that data to a web interface so that the vendors could pull down their preferred version via the Internet. All data was converted on the fly as it was acquired so it would be instantly available to the GIS mapping vendors that were supplying awareness information to providers.
Vendors that used the Medweb data interchange to generate their GIS mapped victim data in one way or another included....
• Mitre
• IDV solutions
• Microsoft
• Visual Awareness Technologies
• ESRI
• INTERGRAPH
• GOOGLE
• General Atomics
I believe a real opportunity still exists to further integrate the mapping and exchange of data between local and national government response organizations, NGO's and Emergency Medical service providers.
We look forward to participating in additional exercises and collaborations to perfect the intercommunication of this information between all parties. Perhaps we could create an online interchange Forum that would allow this development to continue over the internet until the SA4.
I want to thank all of our partners for giving us the opportunity to work with them on this project.
Pete Killcommons, CEO, Medweb, Inc.
Submitted by PeteKillcommons on Wed, 2006-11-01 22:47. login or register to post comments
Joined:
I would like to share with you what happened at SA3 regarding the success or failure of standards based data exchange among the various parties that were collecting, sharing, and displaying GIS mapped Patient data information.
First and foremost, we had complete success in the collection, conversion, and display of the data collected from the Red Cross, Medweb satellite van based clinic, Loma Linda University Hospital satellite telemedicine vehicle, and the Army Battlefield medical PDA (BMIST) from TATRC to the half dozen or so vendors of GIS mapped data display systems. This was, however, accomplished using a very dynamic conversion Clearinghouse approach and we were thankful that we brought our programmers to SA3 since in the end, none of the originally selected formats was actually accepted by the GIS vendors. The USNS Mercy was on a mission and unavailable to participate in the exercise as hoped.
Medweb arrived at SA3 prepared to feed GIS mapped data on victims to each of the participants display systems (i.e. Google) in real-time as we acquired information from roving mobile vans and the red cross, along with reformatting several thousand archived Red Cross records to have GIS points in the San Diego Region. We also prepared to receive data by email and hand delivery for upload to the system.
This activity was planned to meet several of the exercise objectives at a meeting held at SDSU with Eric Frost and Steve Price from the SDSU Viz lab representing Strong Angel and the Shadowlite projects , Lois from NIUSR, as well as Steve Cooper and Frank Barker from the American Red Cross.
Medweb already had relationships with the Army Telemedicine advanced technology research center and had created a gateway that converted patient EMR records from the BMIST or battlefield medical EMR that was developed by TATRC. Medweb also had discussed collaboration with the USNS Mercy through the naval telemedicine office at NNMC since Medweb is already aboard the USNS Comfort, Balboa naval Hospital in San Diego, and a variety of other US navy ships.
Public standard protocols were selected to be supported. These included only the following 2 protocols:
• CAP Common alerting protocol (An xml based standard message type used for AMBER ALERTS)
• RSS Really Simple Syndication (Streaming news internet news feed format)
It turned out that NONE of the GIS mapping vendors was prepared to accept any of these standards. Instead, we received numerous requests for a variety of variations on public formats that were supported by the various vendors.
Medweb provided them on the fly as requested through our DMECH or Disaster Management Electronic Clearing House.
• ACCEPTED XML FROM BMIST (Army Battlefield Medical Information system PDA)
• ACCEPTED HL7 FROM MEDWEB TICTAC (Medweb and Loma Linda using the Medweb TICTAC Clinic Server)
• ACCEPTED CSV FROM THE RED CROSS. (Comma Delimited Text Files)
XML= Extensible Markup Language
HL7= Hospital information system level 7 language
We formatted that data into the following standard Formats initially.
• CAP or Common Alerting Protocol (Amber Alert) Microsoft was the only group to use CAP
• RSS or Really Simple Syndication (SSE as an option)
• KML (Google Earth format) – we used that internally for our own Google map of the data
Simultaneous to our participation in the SA3 exercise, we achieved the following:
Exported DATA to the following Formats as requested by vendors in order to have cohesive display to all GIS mapping vendors:
• GML geography markup Language. OpenGIS.net Used by several
• KML Keyhole markup language Google.com Used by Google
• CAP Common Alerting Protocol (see DHS.gov) – Medweb extended the CAP protocol to hold patient data
• RSS Really Simple Syndication – 2 different variants
- GEORSS – GIS mapped RSS (see georss.org)
- RSS GEO (see W3C.org)
• CSV Comma delimited Format – used by INTERGRAPH, ESRI, and Red Cross
Medweb's DMECH (Disaster Management Elctronic Clearinghouse) delivered that data to a web interface so that the vendors could pull down their preferred version via the Internet. All data was converted on the fly as it was acquired so it would be instantly available to the GIS mapping vendors that were supplying awareness information to providers.
Vendors that used the Medweb data interchange to generate their GIS mapped victim data in one way or another included....
• Mitre
• IDV solutions
• Microsoft
• Visual Awareness Technologies
• ESRI
• INTERGRAPH
• GOOGLE
• General Atomics
I believe a real opportunity still exists to further integrate the mapping and exchange of data between local and national government response organizations, NGO's and Emergency Medical service providers.
We look forward to participating in additional exercises and collaborations to perfect the intercommunication of this information between all parties. Perhaps we could create an online interchange Forum that would allow this development to continue over the internet until the SA4.
I want to thank all of our partners for giving us the opportunity to work with them on this project.
Pete Killcommons, CEO, Medweb, Inc.