With the MU2 guidelines laying strong emphasis on patient engagement and decision support, we thought it would be good to have a relook at the Health Level 7 (HL7) International Context Aware Knowledge Retrieval Standard, commonly known as the HL7 Infobutton, which has been prescribed as a functional standard for context-sensitive functionalities such as patient-specific education resources and referential decision support.
HL7 Infobutton has been around for over 5 years now with significant adoption. The last couple of years have seen a greater number of use cases around the Infobutton. E.g. Evidence-based information resources provided to patients through clinician controlled devices as "information prescriptions” for fostering self-management.
MU2 provides following implementation specifications for HL7 Infobutton:
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L7 V3 Standard |
Context-Aware Retrieval Application (Infobutton), Release 1 |
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HL7 V3 Implementation Guide (option 1) |
URL-Based Implementations of the Context-Aware Information Retrieval (Infobutton) Domain, Release 3 |
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HL7 V3 Implementation Guide (option 2) |
Context-Aware Knowledge Retrieval (Infobutton) Service-Oriented Architecture Implementation Guide, Release 1 |
The challenge today for HIT vendors is that, although HL7 Infobutton is widely adopted, it still involves significant custom integration with content providers. In addition to implementation guides, it needs a common implementation profile, such as the IHE Retrieve Clinical Knowledge (RCK) to make it a truly interoperable standard.