A State Transition Model for the HL7 Technical Committee on Orders and Results

Gunther Schadow

Regenstrief Institute for Health Care, Indianapolis

In this document I propose a state-transition model for the HL7 order/results technical committee. Since the San Francisco Meeting in 1997 I took part in this exciting discussion about this model. However, we did never have enough time in the meetings to dive deep into the model and to finish a draft that would be near complete. Our discussions where rather on a very high level. We therefore agreed to put out a "strawdog" proposal that would be more complete to speed up the process and focus the discussion on important details.

I divided this document into three main parts: First I summarize the scope of the state transition model, because a detailed state-transition model can only be worked out for a specific class of the information model. Second I give a summary on state-transition modeling and explain the features and "language" that I use. Third, and finally, I present the model for the class {\em service intent or order} and its adjactent "relationship" class.

NOTE: Again I fixed a few spelling errors on 9/29/98 but there is no big change in contents. You might want to make sure you have the right version that shows the revision number "Id:... 1.8" printed in small font on the front page.

Five file types for you to choose from: PDF, PDF gzip, PDF ZIP, PostScript, and PostScript gzip.

No, MS Word is not among the file types, because I am on a boycott. Word has stolen me so much time in the past, I will never use it again.


Slide Presentation shown in San Diego:

These slides are a good companion to reading the document, since they can show in animation what is difficult to show printed on paper. There is not much explaining text in the slides, so you are encouraged to download the document above and read it. The slides feature animations for: peeling the onion (alias "stepwise refinement") and walk through life-cycles.

All graphics accessible from here are: Copyright © 1998 Regenstrief Institute. All rights reserved.

If the animations do stand still you might have to clear your browser's cache (both, disk and memory.)


Please note that changes discussed in the meeting have not yet been added to the document or the slides.

Please excuse the insane links to the PDF document. These are fixed now.