Health Level Seven (HL7 www.hl7.org) has released for review and balloting the Personal Health Record System Functional Model DSTU R1 here (zip file).

This is part of an out-of-cycle ballot aimed at rapidly moving the FM into the hands of those who wish to implement. It is a tall drink, with robust provisions for security and interoperability. Those who are accustomed to thinking of a PHR as little more than a fill in the blank web form are going to find a substantially different sort of animal described. In particular, the PHRS described are much more akin to health record banks/trusts (www.healthbanking.org) as described by Amnon Shabo, Marion Ball, Johnathan Gold, Bill Yasnoff and others (including yours truly).

Disclaimer, I am involved in a health record banking service startup (www.healthdatasecurity.com), a PHR software development project (www.tolven.org), the chair of the HRBA standards committee, a co-chair at HL7 (Emergency Care SIG) and a co-chair of the DEEDS (http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/pub-res/deedspage.htm) update and revision workgroup.

My own OSS projects will be a subset of controlled terminologies represented as an API for use in clinical systems (Sourceforge project ECTOPIC) and openCDR, which will be a health record banking system and clinical data repository application. Interest parties are more than welcome!

I am also a happy openSUSE/KDE user and part-time Java hacker.