Anatomic+Pathology

Francois Macary FranÁois Macary   The draft profile from the AP domain is creating quite a lot of interest here in Australia. Our Royal Australasian College of Pathologists has a project team lead by a pathologist David Ellis and project manager Megan Judd. Michael Legg, one of our most experienced health and pathology informaticians has drawn up a quick summary of our efforts in the structured reporting area to date, in order to provide some background. Unfortunately the team has only recently become aware of the work at IHE and has not yet had time to review the profile or other AP profiles in detail, however they would like to engage with you and other leaders of this work to get a better understanding of the context of the work and plans for further work. We would suggest organising a TC during the week of the 27th Sept if that is convenient for the Technical Committee. Please let us know a time based on the timezones of the likely participants. We are GMT +10. It might be best to use the IHE Webbex, however if this is not possible then I am sure than Megan can most likely arrange a voice only TC. You may be aware or interested in a forthcoming meeting on this subject " RACP have a meeting scheduled for Nov 14th in Chicago with CAP, Canada and the UK. Prior to that at a date to be determined is a conference call to start the discussion. "

 I apologise for only creating the links between the Australian efforts and IHE at this late stage - however the IHE local networks did deliver, and I would hope that our Australian and New Zealand work and expertise can contribute and also that subjects like this may lead to local involvement in the IHE Anatomical Path and Laboratory committees and inclusion of our pathologists college as an IHE member and supporter.

Megan Judge has agreed to coordinate the meeting times and discussions on behalf of the RACP and Australian team. As yet we do not have any local instances of XDS or a commitment from our national regulators to adopt the XDS framework within our Australian health communication architecture. We ran a very successful Showcase two weeks back however. Work of this nature is a great example of how a single and yet extensible infrastructure framework can be extended to meet the communication needs of the additional areas of the health sector. (thereby amortising the costs of this infrastructure across many users and maximising reuse of infrastructure and vendor effort). While the CDA structured reports could be moved using point to point messaging infrastructure there is inestimable additional value in having results such as these persisted in an IHE compliant document repository for longitudinal access by pathologists and healthcare services as the patient journey continues. David Ellis was particularly interested in the concept of how the XDS repository would support the management of amended and supplementary reports. Version management is a major quality and safety issue with traditional paper and point to point report delivery methods. Begin forwarded message:

> **From:** "Michael Legg"  > **Date:** 16 September 2010 11:46:43 AM AEST > **To:** "'peter macisaac'"  > **Subject:** **IHE Anatomical Pathology Structured Report technical spec and value set** > Peter MacIsaac, Secretary, IHE Australia Peter, Australia has recently completed the development of protocols for the structured reporting for six cancers and another six are underway. These are comprehensive standards that have drawn interest from Pathology Colleges in the UK, US and Canada. The project description and its outputs are available at__ [] __ Also undertaken were two projects funded by NEHTA and supported by Standards Australia IT-14-6-5, one for the representation of the information models that derive from the protocols (and which also took into account the CAP work) and the other how these complex reports might be transmitted at the atomic level using the existing Australian HL7 v2 message standards. SA IT-14-6-5 have the development of a specification for this on their work program for 2010-2011 and NEHTA are also in the process of considering this as a component of their future work. In relation to the IHE technical specification that has been put to comment, unfortunately while we have provided some response here from NEHTA, we are not yet in a position to fully respond and engage with IHE on this area of work. We expect to be in a position to do that in the next 6-12 months however. We ask that you convey our position to IHE and would welcome the opportunity for dialogue in due course. Regards, Michael Legg, Co-chair IT-14-6-5 and Steering Group Committee Member RCPA Structrured Pathology Reporting of Cancer Professor Michael Legg, PhD FAICD FAIM FACHI MACS ARCPA Principal, Michael Legg & Associates, Consultants in Information and Organisational Systems; Professorial Fellow, Health Informatics Research Centre, University of Wollongong; 12 Dianella Street, Caringbah NSW 2229, Australia - ABN 34706197112; Phone:+61 2 9531 0612 | Mobile:+61 4 1125 6312 | Skype: michael_legg