Updates to HL7 Singapore Townhall 2012 & SOA Training

Dear all,

Quick update on the
1) HL7 Singapore Townhall 2012 (It is open to public, free of charge)
http://www.hl7.org.sg/index.php/hl7-singapore-townhall-2012.html

2) SOA Training Session (continuation from the Townhall meeting)
http://www.hl7.org.sg/index.php/updates/events/175-hl7-and-service-oriented-architecture.html

Date: 30 May (Wed) 2012
Venue: Singapore Management University, Seminar Room 5.1 @ School of Economics & Social Sciences (Level 5)

Agenda

8:30am – 12:30pm – Townhall Meeting (open to public, free of charge)
1:00pm – 5:00pm – SOA Training (continuation from Townhall Meeting, for HL7 SG Members only)

Detailed agenda as well as registration can be found on the links above.

About the Trainer:
Mr. Ken Rubin, Chief Healthcare Architect for the US Federal Healthcare Portfolio for HP Enterprise Services.

Primarily focused on enterprise architecture, electronic health record interoperability, and health informatics, Mr. Rubin has over twenty years of industry experience and ten years of health informatics experience. He spent seven years leading application architecture EA activities for the Veterans Health Administration, in addition to work he has done for healthcare clients in the UK and Australia.

Mr. Rubin is very active in the standards community, holding positions as co-chair of the HL7 Service-Oriented Architecture Workgroup, co-chair of the OMG Healthcare Domain Task Force and the Healthcare Service Specification Project (HSSP), and serves as the Enterprise Architect for Open Health Tools, an open-source software community.

AMBIS Biomedical Symposium 2012

The Association for Medical and Bio-Informatics, Singapore (AMBIS) welcomes all biomedical professionals to its annual symposium. This event features prominent speakers from various healthcare and research institutions in Singapore, with opportunities for learning and networking.

Date/Time: 25th May 2012. 10am till 6pm
Venue: National University Singapore, Lecture theatre 28.
Fees: S$60 (includes meals and free annual AMBIS membership)

Two tracks:
1) Medical Informatics Track
http://ambisnews.blogspot.ca/2012/04/ambis-biomedical-symposium-2012-mi.html

2) BioInformatics Track
http://ambisnews.blogspot.ca/2012/04/ambis-biomedical-symposium-bi-track.html

Speakers Profiles can be accessed at http://ambisnews.blogspot.ca/2012/04/invited-speakers-for-ambis-symposium.html

So do mark your calender for the annual AMBIS Biomedical Symposium 2012.
Registration Link: http://ambisnews.blogspot.ca/2012/04/sign-up-for-ambis-2012-biomedical.html

Ramblings: I’m heading off to Vancouver

That’s right, I’m heading off to Vancouver, Canada for the next 2 weeks (well, actually it would be more than 2 weeks but lets just leave it as that).

So what am I doing there? (it is a long way from where I currently call ‘home’)

It is to attend technical work-groups –  two of them.

The first is the ISO TC215 workgroup, the Health Informatics Technical Committee that is responsible for the “standardization in the field of information for health, and Health Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to promote interoperability between independent systems, to enable compatibility and consistency for health information and data, as well as to reduce duplication of effort and redundancies.”

I’m attending the work-group as part of the official Singapore Delegation so its kind of cool (and making a difference mate!)

The second work-group I’m attending is the HL7 May 2012 Workgroup which I’m attending as HL7 SG’s Vice-Chair (the Chair will be attending too).

It would be my first HL7 Workgroup meeting so I’m not sure what to expect (although I’m sure it will be a fruitful trip).

So I’m going to be away for while and hopefully I’ll find the time to blog alittle (although the agendas for both events looks kind of packed).

Till my next update~

HL7 v2.x Comprehensive Training with v2.7 Certification Exam in Singapore, July 2012

Dear Health IT Professionals,

HL7 Singapore is pleased to announce an upcoming HL7 v2.x Comprehensive Training with v2.7 Certification Exam in July 2012.

Date:                3^rd week of July 2012 (exact date to be confirmed at a later date)
Venue:              Actual venue to be announced at a later date
Trainer:             A/Prof Klaus Veil, HL7 Australia
Proctor:             A/Prof Adam Chee, HL7 Singapore
Duration:          Three full days
Cost:                S$2500

Note:

• Participants need not process hands-on experience with HL7 v2.x
• Participants need not be a member of HL7 Singapore to enroll in the prep course and exam
• This capacity building initiative is opened to everyone, even out of Singapore

Agenda:

• HL7 v2.x Comprehensive Training
• HL7 v2.7 Certification Exam

As part of cost recovery, HL7 Singapore needs to gather enough participants before proceeding with the event.

If you are interested, please kindly revert with the following details to adamchee@binaryhealthcare.com by 1 Jun 2012.

- Name
- Email
- Contact
- Organization
* Please indicate number of participants if you are organizing on behalf of your organization.

Please kindly pass this email around to your friends and colleagues who would be interested in being achieving industry-recognized levels of proficiency and expertise as a “HL7 Certified” professional.

Regards
Dr. Adam Chee
Vice-Chair, HL7 Singapore

About The Trainer
Klaus Veil has been involved in Healthcare IT for over 25 years. For 7 years he was the CIO of a major Australian health care corporation – as a result, the integration of diverse health information systems has been his ongoing focus.

He is President of the Australasian College of Health Informatics and manages a specialised Health IT systems interoperability consultancy in Sydney.
Klaus is active in the development of health information technology standards – both in Australia and internationally.

He is chairman of the peak Australian HL7 Standards Committees and past Chair of HL7 Australia. For 8 years, Klaus served as the only non-US member on the Board of HL7 International.

Klaus is an accomplished teacher in Health Informatics standards; he an Adj. Associate Professor at the University of Western Sydney and has taught at Sydney University and LaTrobe University, Melbourne, as well as in the USA, the UK, Germany, Bulgaria. Malaysia and China.

Certified Professional in Healthcare Information and Management Systems – CPHIMS

Now I’m sure a lot of you folks are familiar with the CPHIMS certification by HIMSS (Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society)

CPHIMS or Certified Professional in Healthcare Information and Management Systems, is a professional certification program for healthcare information and management systems professionals. The CPHIMS credential is recognized throughout the industry as the international standard of healthcare IT knowledge.

As some of you might know, I serve as an advisor to the CPHIMS Technical Committee (Yes, that’s right, the actual committee that  governs the CPHIMS Program and designs the Exam).

The Committee oversees performance of the exam, reviews and refines test items, develops new editions of the exam, contributes to plans for marketing and promotion of the certification, and provides consultation for maintenance of a quality program with the guidance of our psychometric consultants.

Now for those who knows me well in my professional life, I advocate extensively on the adoption of the CPHIMS certification in the South East Asia region, especially Singapore and Malaysia.

Recently, I volunteer to conduct the CPHIMS Review Course for the upcoming HIMSS Asia Pacific Conference in Singapore (in September) but I just received notification that I can’t serve as the instructor as there is a potential conflict of interest (as I serve on the actual CPHIMS Technical Committee). Ouch.

The good news is, the next day, I received the official invitation to continue my term as an advisor for another year.

I guess I must be doing a good job

Australia to launch one-stop online gateway for aged care

I got this piece of news from FutureGov.

Seems that the Aged Care market is indeed the next ‘big thing’.

The Australian Government is launching an internet portal tracking aged care services, while streamlining access to information about nursing homes, staffing levels, amenities and community care services.

This My Aged Care internet portal, to be supported by dedicated phone services, goes live in early 2013. It is part of a US$3.84 billion (AUD$3.7 billion) reform agenda designed to overhaul aged care services in Australia.

For the first time, the My Aged Care portal will feature a star rating system for nursing homes and other aged care services, including any previous history of complaints or feedback about the quality of care.

The government is introducing a single information-access gateway to consolidate information about services, according to the Minister for Ageing, Mark Butler.

He said the My Aged Care website will offer detailed information about aged care providers, available services, amenities, staffing levels, fees and other charges.

This on-line gateway will enable families and older Australians to compare and make informed choices about the quality of available care and affordability.

The My Aged Care web site is the latest internet portal that caters for specific communities, including the MySchool, MyHospital, and MyUniversity web sites.

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard said Australians are living longer; this has implications for how the government runs its aged care program.

The latest reform tackles long-standing concerns about the quality of aged care in Australia affecting elderly and often poorly-informed residents.

“We now have a new generation moving into retirement, the baby boomers, who will clearly want more options and choices than older Australians have sought in the past,” PMGillard said.

“Families can’t get the information they need to make difficult choices.”

Australia’s system of monitoring and compliance needs to be overhauled to give would-be residents and their families a true picture of nursing home quality.

”Now it’s just about putting a tick or cross in a box; all residents or family members should be asked their views for a start.”

Internet-savvy baby boomers are changing perceptions about ageing; they also expect better information and choices about the quality of care, nursing homes, and other facilities.

Australia’s aged care services are severely stressed – with many Australians forced to sell homes under “fire sales” to finance their need for care.

Commercially-run nursing homes are under scrutiny about the quality of services, while being expensive to finance for families seeking services for parents or elderly relatives.

More disturbingly, 40 per cent of older Australians are forced into emergency fire sales of their homes, according to PM Gillard.

These sales are to raise money to pay for care. At the top end, these bonds can cost as much as US$2.6 million (AUD$2.5 million), and bear no resemblance to the cost of accommodation being provided in nursing homes.

PM Gillard said Australia’s overhaul of aged care services, and improved information access, will give older Australians and their families greater choice and control than they’ve had in the past.

Medical imaging: Seeing eye to eye

I received this via an email update earlier on (from A*Star) and thought I’ll share it.

The human eye has a blind spot, a region where optic nerves meet and therefore has no photoreceptors for detecting and perceiving light. This blind spot, also known as the optic disc, plays a crucial part in the eye’s physiology and the diagnosis of eye diseases. However, optic disc detection and segmentation from retinal images can become challenging due to various ocular pathologies that could degrade the image quality severely.

Shijian Lu at the A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research and co-workers have now provided a solution to this long-standing problem by developing a computer algorithm that is able to detect the optic disc from retinal images with unprecedented precision and accuracy¹.

The variations in optic disc appearance for different eyes have made it difficult for computer algorithms to pinpoint disc centre and boundary with sufficient accuracy for medical diagnostics. Often, diseases or other features in the eye such as blood vessels make assignments difficult. The basis on which algorithms identify the optic disc is usually through its brighter appearance compared to surrounding areas. Through such an analysis, a region can be identified in which the optic disc is most likely to be.

The algorithm developed by Shijian Lu now takes the information on the probable locations for the disc and refines it by taking a step further — assuming that the optic disc is usually round. The circular transformation method developed by Lu looks for maximum variations in brightness along radial lines spreading out from the region of the probable location of the optic disc. By passing through several filters, the researchers could identify the disc boundary, and consequently the disc center.

In tests on standardized retina photographs, the algorithm was able to identify the optic disc with 98.8% detection accuracy. The placement error of the disc center was only six pixels. Moreover, the sampling speed of the photos was only five seconds. This can be enhanced even further by at least a factor of ten as the software was written on a non-optimized software package.

Such accuracy and sub-second speeds make this method promising for clinical use. “This is a breakthrough for automatic computer aided diagnosis of ocular diseases, because few state-of-the-art techniques can handle the optic disc segmentation for severely degraded pathological retinal images,” says Lu. Clinical trials under more difficult circumstances than the standardized photographs will follow. If successful, this new method could greatly improve the detection of eye diseases.

Just an FYI, I actually reviewed the system used to acquire and distribute the images (it was part of a tele-ocular project) and the only missing piece (back then) was the computer aided diagnosis part of things and viola, seems like they are close to sorting this out.