Supporting interoperability by leveraging message systems in health informatics environments

Leveraging standards-based messaging as a means to transmit data between public health resources is a key aspect of developing a scalable and functional public health information network. A critical aspect of the successful implementation of this approach is a methodology for mapping the semantics and syntax of used at the remote sites, which may vary widely, into the standard messages that are transferred between the participating systems.  The Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid™ has addressed the need to share data that resides within clinical systems that are not readily available for direct access to the database and do not expose usable or accessible APIs.  The caBIG™ program has developed a simple, open source set of tools and infrastructure to aid in the movement of data across the cancer center community. By using a standards-based messaging infrastructure and grid services, idiosyncratic HL7v2.x messages and even tabular ASCII and *.csv data formats can be semantically mapped  to standard messages which can then be transmitted to remote sites, stored and accessed for later retrieval.  This presentation will provide and overview of how these open source components can be used and what it takes to configure, and deploy and use them.   Additionally, the presentation will address how the components work together today in the caBIG™ program and how this can be possibly be leveraged for public health applications.