Focus

• By all healthcare environment stakeholders, i.e., clinicians, administrators, researchers, patients, educators, developers, and other standards development organizations in meeting the demands of their business
• In the development of new healthcare components, to be seamlessly integrated from a number of different providers each leveraging their expertise
• In “wrapping” existing applications so that they can be utilized without totaling eliminating or re-constructing them
• In allowing existing applications to co-exist with other existing applications or new components
• When older applications need to be re-tooled but not necessarily thrown away while keeping them operational

• The OMG process lends itself nicely to getting work done in an efficient, consensus-based approach
• The infrastructure developed by the OMG is referred to as the Object Management Architecture (OMA). It has grown into a powerful toolkit of tools and services, including a set of lower layer interoperability tools known as the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). It also includes a rich set of services and facilities, which serve as the infrastructure and glue to make distributed computing possible.
• The OMA allows us to utilize the evolutionary approaches in the world of computer science that have led us to today as well as where we are headed in the future.
• The object-oriented paradigm further provides subject matter experts the ability to become an integral part of the development of automated systems, which, in turn, provides a more closely aligned solution to their day-to-day business. Standards from the OMG such as the Unified Modeling Language (UML) bring the subject matter expert and the technologist together to create, and capture complex systems in a tool that is being exploited for extensibility through external tool builders for inclusion into new and existing applications
• A somewhat overlooked aspect centers around the fact that there are a number of other domains and experts who work in different areas of the OMG but bring with them a wealth of knowledge that can be tapped and utilized within the healthcare domain, for example, security, telecommunications, finance, manufacturing, etc.

1994 - Healthcare Special Interest Group (SIG) was formed
1996 – Healthcare SIG became the Healthcare Domain Task Force (DTF)
1997 – Liaison relationship with HL7 was formed
1997 – Liaison relationship with DICOM was formed
1997 – European Healthcare Chapter was formed
1998 – Person Identification Service (PIDS) standard was adopted
1998 – Terminology Query Service (TQS) standard was adopted
1999 – Healthcare DTF Roadmap published
1999 – Content Access Service (COAS) standard was adopted
1999 – Resource Access Decision (RAD) standard was adopted
1999 – Liaison relationship with X12 was formed
1999 – Latin America Healthcare Chapter was formed
2000 – Clinical Image Access Service (CIAS) standard was adopted
2000 – Heterogeneous Information Locator Service (HILS) Request for Proposal (RFP) issued
2000 – Liaison with International Organization for Standardization (ISO) (in progress)