1. Semantic Interoperability for the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology Brand Niemann and the Health Information Technology Ontology Pilot Community of Practice November 9, 2006

2. Bio EPA Office of the Chief Information Officer and Assistant Administrator for Environmental Information (OEI): –Data Architect Federal CIO Council’s Best Practices Committee (BPC): –Secretariat Semantic Interoperability Community of Practice (SICoP): –Co-Chair

3. Overview 1. The Broader Context 2. History of Support for ONC/NHIN 3. Proposed Next Steps 4. Questions and Answers

4. 1. The Broader Context The Federal CIO Council has Four Committees: –Executive Committee (EC): OMB Senior Leadership and the Co-Chairs of the Other Three Committees –Architecture & Infrastructure (AIC) –Best Practices (BPC) –IT Work Force (WFC)

5. 1. The Broader Context The Best Practices Committee has Five Communities of Practice: –Enterprise Process Improvement (EPIC) –IT Performance Management (ITPM) –Knowledge Management (KMWG) –Semantic Interoperability (SICoP) –Spatial Ontology (SOCoP)

6. 1. The Broader Context The Semantic Interoperability CoP (SICoP) is chartered to do White Papers (2), Pilots (many), and Conferences (5 th on October 10-11 th ). The SICoP has Six Work Groups: –Agile Financial Data Services (AFDS) –Health Information Technology Ontology Project (HITOP) –Cross-Domain Semantic Interoperability (CDSI) –Ontology and Taxonomy Coordination (ONTAC) –Semantic Wikis and Information Management (SWIM) –Vocabulary Management (VMWG)

7. 2. History of Support for ONC/NHIN (1) Ontology-Driven Information System for Clinical Support (Dr. Mark Musen, Stanford Medical Informatics) (2) Joint Response to RFI with Partner Ontolog Forum (Community of Practice of the World’s Ontologists) (3) Analysis of the RFIs Using Semantic Technologies (Demonstrated to the ONC)

8. 2. History of Support for ONC/NHIN (4) Founding Member of the National Center for Ontological Research (Recipient of NIH Roadmap Grant for Ontologies in Bioinformatics and Center of Excellence in Biomedical Ontologies) (5) Started Health Information Technology Ontology Pilot (Activities Documented in Wiki Page) (6) Federal Health Architecture’s Data Architecture WG Pilot (Health US 2005 Report as a DRM 2.0-Compliant Data Network)

9. 2. History of Support for ONC/NHIN (7) 4 th Semantic Technologies for E-Government Conference (SemantxLife Sciences Semantic Indexing and Searching for Boston Children’s Hospital and PubMed) (8) Joint Open Group/SICoP Conference on Semantic Naming and Identification Technologies (EHR Use Case) (9) Tutorial by Professor Ken Baclawski on Ontologies for Genomic Data (Co-author of Ontologies for Bioinformatics)

10. 2. History of Support for ONC/NHIN (10) Interagency Environmental Heath Data Action Team (EHDAT) (Pilot Network Framework Using Organization-Topic Matrix and Infrastructure Using Semantic Wikis) (11) First NIHN Forum (Testimony to the NCVHS and Requested Followup) (12) Open Collaboration: Networking National Health Information Technology (Collaborative Expedition Workshop #50, April 18, 2006, at NSF)

11. 2. History of Support for ONC/NHIN (13) Open Collaboration: Networking Semantic Interoperability (Collaborative Expedition Workshop #53, August 15, 2006, at NSF): –Mike Cummens (MD), Semantic Interoperability for the DoD Computerized Medical Record System. (14) 5 th Semantic Interoperability for E-Government Conference, October 10-11 th, and 2 nd SOA for E- Government Conference, October 30-31 st : –Arun Majumdar, Case Study: Big Pharma. Company – Semantic SOA & meta-model for a global scale interoperability across 200 companies and lines of business. (15) 2 nd SOA for E-Government Conference, October 30- 31 st,SOA CoP Demo for the Financial Management & Human Resources Lines of Business (Has Application to the FHA LoB and NHIN)

12. 3. Proposed Next Steps IT adoption can be seen as developing in four fairly distinct operational and financial levels where: –Level 1 represents no electronic data; and NO STANDARDS. –Level 2 represents rudimentary electronic data at the level of email and fax; NO HIT STANDARDS. –Level 3 represents machine-organizable data, such as simple flat and hierarchical and relational databases with some integration of processing and can be seen as the current level at which IT-savvy businesses operate and which represents a sizable monetary investment; and chaotic HIT STANDARDS. –Level 4 represents machine-interpretable data, where “interpretable” signifies that data is organized by semantic principles such that the meaning as well as data can be used by a distributed network such as the NHIN envisions AND Ontology-Driven HIT Standards.

13. 3. Proposed Next Steps HITOP Recommends Building on the Work Done Thus Far to Extend the Demonstrations of Semantic Interoperability for ONC/NHIN by: –Establishing a Semantic Interoperability Work Group in ONC with the FHA as its domain; –Further extending the Terminology Services Bureau component of the Northrop Grumman NHIN Prototype; and –Further development of the Web Services Registry for the Health Informatics and Emergency Management domains.

14. 4. Questions and Answers Brand Niemann: –Niemann.brand@epa.gov –202-236-6432 Marc Wine: –Marc.wine@gsa.gov –202-255-6655 HITOP Wiki Page: –http://colab.cim3.net/cgi- bin/wiki.pl?HealthInformationTechnologyCommunityof Practice