Cognitive Medical Systems, a specialist in standards-based clinical decision support software and healthcare IT infrastructure, announced today that it is participating in the HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) Connectathon 12 in Montreal May 7-8.

FHIR is an HL7 standard for exchanging electronic health information and is representative of a rapid, flexible, and open application development approach promising to reduce cost and complexity. The FHIR Connectathon series is designed for testing of FHIR-based resources and validating the ability to actually implement the specification.

“FHIR adoption is growing rapidly, due in part to the health IT community coming together for these Connectathons,” said Emory Fry, MD, Cognitive Medical Systems CEO. “They provide valuable confirmation about the maturity of the standard and are critical to our goal of creating open, functional architecture.”

The Connectathon 12 validation work has been split into tracks, including the Service-Oriented Architecture, Clinical Quality Framework, and CDS HOOKS tracks. These tracks have been selected to be part of a first pilot in a series with the intent to validate the adequacy of proposed standards for the orchestration of sophisticated clinical quality scenarios within a FHIR-based ecosystem.

The CDS-SOA tracks will be implemented within the context of a selected clinical quality measure in the neonatal care domain. For this pilot, the community has selected the “Exclusive Breastfeeding Measure.”

Other organizations participating in the Connectathon include Database Solutions, Health Samurai, Intermountain Healthcare, OSIA Medical, Partners Healthcare, Regenstrief, and the University of Utah.