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ART-DECOR® Newsletter, 23 July 2021
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Let the New Story begin: ART-DECOR® Release 3
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1. Discover the Journey Towards Healthcare Interoperability
2. A short look at how we came here!
3. ART-DECOR Release 3 series has started!
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Discover the Journey Towards Healthcare Interoperability
ART-DECOR® is an open source tool suite that aims at interoperability solutions in the healthcare sector.
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The tool is used in more than 80 projects worldwide, mainly in Europe, the server park houses more than 10,000 artifacts such as CDA templates and value sets from various teams of experts (governance groups), from small and medium-sized interoperability projects to large national and international infrastructure projects, for example in Austria, Switzerland, Poland.
This year October 1st, it’s ART-DECOR’s 12th birthday. Reason enough to take a short look back in history and to look forward on what we call ART-DECOR Release 3. And the future starts now.
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A short look at how we came here!
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The Early Years
Back in 2008 was the beginning of the tool – in those times still known as “DECOR” only and without a User Interface – and it started for some Dutch projects, including Perinatology, General Practice Information Exchange, Diabetes Care. Later in 2009, also a Laboratory project eLab with IHE Netherlands in the lead and some other projects without Nictiz followed.
All these projects had in common, that healthcare IT specifications were documented on huge spreadsheets, that vary even from project to project. In three large areas, the sheets collected the functional healthcare provider view, scenarios to the very left and finally the technical specifications. Some of our readers may vividly remember this “methodology”.
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The DECOR method
The DECOR method is used since then as a consistent replacement for the spreadsheets and to overcome varieties, inconsistencies and errors when going through the life cycle of health IT specifications, from requirement documentation, scenarios, profiles and support implementation as well as the testing and production phase.
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In the beginning, the so-called called DECOR specifications were a collection of XML-based definition files and a set of transformation scripts, mainly used by batch processing to create documentation and particularly test and validation methods for data instances using ISO schematron.
Making it ART
In 2009, Gerrit Boers added the User Interface and a database to DECOR. Since then, the tool has the name ART-DECOR (Advanced Requirements Tooling – Data Elements, Codes, OIDs and Rules). Next to the introduction of an XML database, a comprehensive Query language and an Xforms framework was introduced for further development.
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ART-DECOR Expert Group
At almost the same time the ART-DECOR® Expert Group was formed initially comprised of specialists from Netherlands and Germany, to coordinate and drive the development.
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The tool quickly became a home for other foreign projects such as the Dutch Infrastructure Specifications for the so-called AORTA, the CDA specifications of the Deutsche Rentenversicherung DRV in 2009, HL7 Germany in 2010, and some European projects in 2011 such as the Information Exchange Dialysis Treatment and for the European Renal Association and regional e-health projects in Norway and Lithuania.
ART-DECOR is used since then also for various integration projects in Europe. For example, after the epSOS (Smart Open Services for European Patients) project finalized its first phase in 2014, subsequent project phases use the tool for development and maintenance of the specifications. The eHealth Digital Service Infrastructure (eHDSI for cross-border health data exchange under the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) set up and started deploying specifications for Patient Summary and e-prescription. Since the first official release in 2014 many other publications followed. 2015 and ongoing ART-DECOR and IHE Europe signed a Memorandum of Understanding in 2015 aiming on synergistic tooling: The ART-DECOR tools suite and IHE Gazelle Objects Checker facilitate the creation and consistent standardized documentation of CDA based specifications and support rigorous compliance validation and testing.
The collaboration was also subject on the ART-DECOR Specification Developer Days at the International HL7 Interoperability Conference (IHIC) in Prague February 2015. Along with tutorials and speakers about special topics from Nictiz in the Netherlands, and IHE Europe, also the collaboration with IHE Gazelle Object Checker for an efficient specification, maintenance, testing and validation tool suite was explained.
ART-DECOR Release 2.0 was published in 2017 and a lot of features were added, also through the feedback of the growing community. The tool is subject of several Bachelor and Master theses in the area of medical informatics.
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ART-DECOR® Open Tools
In 2017, ART-DECOR® Open Tools has been established as a Company to handle all commercial aspects of the ART-DECOR® tool suite, offers commercial support for customers working with the tool and strategically complements the ART-DECOR® Expert Group that drives the development.
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Around the start of a new decade
Meanwhile specifications for National Infrastructures in the Netherlands, Austria (ELGA), Switzerland (e-health Suisse) and Poland are hosted by ART-DECOR, as well as support for large national and international organizations including clients of IHE Europe, the Deutsche Gesetzliche Unfallversicherung DGUV or projects such as the Medical Informatics Initiative in Germany, the Ministry of Health of British Columbia, Canada, the Sequoia project in the US and regional specifications in Italy and Denmark (and others not listed here).
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The New Story Begins
In January 2020, right before the Corona crisis, the ART-DECOR Experts met in Berlin for their strategy and planning meeting and decided to move on with a new Frontend Development Framework and a complete rewrite of the User Interface. A New Story began: ART-DECOR® Release 3
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ART-DECOR Release 3 series has started!
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After months of inspiring development, ART-DECOR® Release 3 will be published step by step starting now and brings along many new features and improvements.
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New User Interface
A new user interface with an improved user experience (UX) are only the superficial changes: a new framework (Vue) replaces the Orbeon platform, which accompanied us over the time but is now getting on in years. If you are immediately curious, please visit our build server. |
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For the new front end, the ART-DECOR Expert Team was competently expanded in September 2020 by a specialized Vue and Vuetify developer and two more development experts joined from Nictiz side in the first quarter of 2021. We continue the icon and color language throughout the app and hope you are feeling the well-balanced mix out of well-known and innovative look-and-feel and features. The eXist database (exist-db.org) remains as the well-founded backend. Not only an update to the latest version has been done here, but a strategic alliance with eXist Solutions is now also inspiring the development team at their end as well as the ART-DECOR expert team. The conversion of the previous API to microservices and new authentication mechanisms was started successfully and has progressed much. This also contributes to better scalability and reliability. Furthermore, the centralized ART-DECOR Terminology Services (CADTS) is continuously being worked on. The new rapid cross-terminology browser is just only the start, see our new Terminology Browser Panel. New documentation platforms and functions (PDF, Mediawiki, and new Confluence, Wordpress) are already in the consolidation phase in the ADBot v12 release and six UI languages are now supported. The User Group, which was started in the Netherlands and is hosted by Nictiz (nictiz.nl), brings also in new aspects to the development of the open-source tool suite. |
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The FHIR® topic will also be expanded further.
FHIR will be even more part of the ART-DECOR Terminology Services. For the treatment of concept maps in the broader sense, a member of the expert team with his master's thesis works on this topic, along with others.
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FHIR®-Questionnaires Management (FQM) already picked up speed in 2020 (see also the ART-DECOR Blog blog.art-decor.org). A FHIR profile editor is in the draft and should go into the test and consolidation phase starting by quarter four of 2021. It uses similar profiling mechanism already known from CDA template profiling, provides basic and some advanced functions for the profiling of FHIR resources, makes use of many of the other ART-DECOR features and collaborates with common profile repositories.
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The overall Release 2 timeline has now spanned more than a decade, and with Release 3 starting mid 2021, another important milestone will contribute to more cooperation, more interoperability.
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Overview of the Releases 3There are several Releases 3 published/planned for 2021 - 3.0 July 21st, as a Canary Release*
- 3.1 at the beginning of August as a Canary Release*
- 3.2 end of August
- 3.3 September
- 3.4 October/November
- 3.5 December
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| *Canary Release :: is a release for Early Birds who volunteer to test it and runs on build.art-decor.org (international) and art-decor3.test-nictiz.nl (Netherlands focus) |
To summarize the topics of the ART-DECOR Release 3:
- New UI / UX
- Microservices
- Better Scalability, higher Reliability
- Extended Documentation Platforms
- Centralized ART-DECOR® Terminology Services (CADTS)
- More FHIR Support (Repository, Profiling)
Release 3.0 for Canaries and Early Birds
If you want to be part of the first wave visitors of Releases of ART-DECOR, please let us know. You may stray around on build.art-decor.org without a password to just see what the new interface looks like. If you want to test the first feature, please let us know (e-mail us) and we assign a username and password to you and point to practical projects.
Release 3 will first cover to see a Landing page where you can choose a project to inspect or work with.
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Choose a project and start your endeavors. Please provide feedback if you like through the provided link.
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Once a project is chosen, see the Project Overview and continue from there.
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You can go tho the main subject of this release: datasets with the navigation tree on the left and details shown on the right. Just try the new look-and-feel with our example datasets or a selection of "real" datasets coming from different projects.
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In this Release 3.0, the so-called Project Panel (Overview, Authors, Identifiers, Release List, History), Issues and Datasets are available to investigate.
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Join the JourneyA recent survey among users and interested parties of the ART-DECOR tool suite unveiled that they want to use the platform more than in the past. They are curious about the new user experience and look forward to seeing new features.
The team will do its best to deploy good and efficient software. Please feel free to join the new paths of our journey towards more interoperability in healthcare.
There will be follow-up information on the next releases soon.
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Title Photo: @tobiasmrzyk – unsplash.com
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