HL7 (http://www.hl7.org) is the leading standards provider for the Healthcare IT industry. For several years HL7 has been engaged a process that may best be called “Model Driven Standards Development”. The primary outcome of the process is a new version of the HL7 standard, V3. In this process, based broadly around the UML standard developed by the OMG (http://www.omg.org), the standards are developed by a process of information modelling, so that the standards HL7 delivers are highly internally consistent, even though covering a broad range of functionality and developed by many people from many different parts of the industry.

As part of this process, HL7 has developed it’s own set of in-house tools which are used to support the model driven design, and then to automatically publish the full standard directly from the model driven design.

These tools have served HL7 very well over the last few years, but the time has come for a new generation of tools. The HL7 internal tooling is developed under the guidance of the HL7 Tooling Committee, and this committee has been developing a plan for a new set of tools to support improved HL7 processes. This committee has recognized the Eclipse platform (http://www.eclipse.org) as it’s preferred platform for this new generation of tools.

Since the HL7 standards are very broad, internally consistent, and model based, it follows naturally that users – implementers, analysts, and programmers – would like to be able to use automated processes to work with the standard. The HL7 tools were not developed with these requirements in mind, and the market adoption of HL7 V3 is being hindered by the lack of suitability of the HL7 tools for their requirements, and lack of applicability of standard market tools for these requirements.

The Eclipse Open Healthcare Framework (OHF) project recognizes in this situation an opportunity to develop a product that will meet HL7’s requirements and also provide a basis for the provision of sophisticated tools to support HL7 V3 users. Consequently, Eclipse OHF has proposed the H3ET project (HL7 V3 Eclipse Tools).

The H3ET tooling project will deliver an extensible tool environment that is designed to span all aspects associated with creating and implementing HL7 V3 designs, from model design to code generation and run-time message analysis and validation. It is an Eclipse based framework designed to run standalone or to be combined with a broad array of commercially available tools as part of the application development lifecycle, for clients, gateways and servers.

The H3ET tooling project will be an open source project developed following the well recognized Eclipse governance processes, and the final product will be available as open source under the EPL license. The Eclipse OHF committers will lead the project, but contributions from any interested users, particularly within the HL7 community will be both welcome and sought, and we will be working to build a community of users and contributors in association with HL7 through the HL7 community process.

The HL7 Tooling Committee has adopted the H3ET proposal and recommended that HL7 members support the project. Jiva Medical is the designated project lead for H3ET on behalf of the Eclipse OHF. This document describes the H3ET product and proposes a development project to the CHU to accelerate the core H3ET project by funding specific components of the envisioned tools framework. The funding provided by the CHU will drive the development priorities of the H3ET development team.

Please click here for more information on the H3ET product