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Welcome to the Projectathon | March 2023 Event Page.||
This page provides introductory information about the approach, participants and requirements for the March 2023 Projectathon. For information about the Projectathon agenda, daily reports and session webinars, please visit the Schedule: Projectathon 2023 page. |
Table of Contents
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Introduction
2023 Overview! NOTE: The Projectathon 2023 event has been completed. The final report is available here. On this page, you will find:
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Projectathon Introduction
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Building on the successes of the first pan-Canadian Projectathon event held in March 2022, Infoway, in collaboration with the provinces and territories, invites vendors to participate in the March 2023 Projectathon. Projectathons are an important step and best-practice approach in testing and validation of a specification package, where implementers demonstrate live interoperability of solutions in conformance with pan-Canadian specifications. Read more about Projectathons here.
The focus of the Projectathon March 2022 was The objective of this Projectathon is to test and improve the quality of the pan-Canadian Patient Summary Interoperability Specifications (PS-CA Specifications) to ensure they are implementable, testable and meet expectations. The PS-CA supports several implementation patterns including MHD and a new Canadian National integration profile called CA:FeX. The CA:FeX supports saving and retrieving clinical data to and from a central document repository.
The aims of the Projectathon are to identify potential issues in the basic specifications, give implementers a chance to test their implementations in live environments, and strengthen implementation guidelines and standards in the health sector. Infoway views this as a preliminary event before any conformity assessment, quality label or certification process.
Participants
Vendors and jurisdictions who plan= to implement the PS-CA Specifications are invited to participate in the Projectathon. In addition, any interested party that has Patient Summaries in their future roadmap are welcome to participate.
Participants of the Projectathon are able to:
- Have the opportunity to be an early adopter and an influencer of the final specification;
- Gain a better understanding of the expected integration patterns for their products;
- Identify dependencies and integration challenges;
- Interact with the jurisdictional teams that will ultimately use their products;
- Ensure quality for the benefit of clinicians and patients;
- Accelerate their readiness for implementation;
- Save time and money through a harmonized pan-Canadian approach;
- Get familiar with the validation/testing processes and tools; and
- Help achieve our collective goals of developing a quality national standard.
Additionally, through participation in the Projectathon, participants were able to prepare for practical applications of the PS-CA Specifications.
Approach
A suite of virtual tools, collectively referred to as Gazelle, will be deployed to support the free, 4-day remote testing event from March 6-9, 2023. Gazelle provides vendors an opportunity to validate the role they will be playing in an ecosystem and ensure they are able to satisfy the interoperability requirements. Furthermore, Gazelle offers several self-serve, self-test and innovation opportunities for jurisdictions and vendors to test their alignment to the represented integration profiles.
The Projectathon event was organized by Infoway with support from a world leader organization in the space - IHE Catalyst.
Preparation and Requirements
In preparation for the Projectathon, Infoway and IHE Catalyst will:
- Host training webinars;
- Develop a FHIR document viewer;
- Deploy an OpenAPI browser for both interface specifications (MHD and CA:FeX);
- Develop clinical scenarios that identified the required test data for the Projectathon;
- Offer helpdesk support prior to and during the Projectathon; and
- Publish a report on learnings after the Projectathon.
Participants are required to:
- Register for the event
- Attend training webinars
- Review training materials
- Complete pre-Projectathon and connectivity testing
- Validate test cases and clinical scenarios
- Integrate to Gazelle platform
- Create test records
- Implement APIs
- Prototype FHIR transactions
- Prototype the PS-CA FHIR document
- Prototype export of FHIR document
Interoperability Specifications
Details about the 2022 event are available in the 2022 pan-Canadian Projectathon final report available here.
The March 2023 Projectathon was dedicated to supporting Patient Summary implementation projects across Canada. On November 10, 2022, TECHNATION Canada hosted Canada Health Infoway to hold an information sharing webinar regarding the details of the Interoperability Projectathon for 2023. The trimmed recording of the webinar is available here.
The final report for the 2023 pan-Canadian Projectathon is available here.
Focus of the Projectathon March 2023
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The Projectathon 2023 focused on interoperability demonstrations based on the pan-Canadian Patient Summary (PS-CA
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The PS-CA Interoperability Bundle is comprised of the following specification documents that may be accessed here.
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pan-Canadian Patient Summary Interoperability Specifications (PS-CA Specifications)
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v1.0.0 TI) and the associated pan-Canadian FHIR Exchange (CA:FeX v1.0.0 TI) specifications, both ready for trial implementation. The PS-CA specification defines the building blocks to create and share
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pan-Canadian Patient Summary – FHIR Implementation Guide
- Implementable, testable specification for the HL7 FHIR composition that defines the data payload of the PS-CA specification, based on the HL7 FHIR IPS implementation guide.
- Contains information for solution developers to implement the PS-CA content data model using the HL7® Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) standard. It describes the data elements & types, cardinality, constraints, and code system references.
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pan-Canadian Patient Summary - Companion Guide to Use Cases & Definitions
- Companion document to the PS-CA Specifications that presents the broader context for clinical, business, interoperability and solution development considerations that were discovered during the development of the PS-CA.
- Defines the healthcare problem that the PS-CA addresses and includes healthcare use cases and interoperability requirements in terms that will be traceable to the content in the pan-Canadian Patient Summary - Companion Guide to Reference Architecture.
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pan-Canadian Patient Summary - Companion Guide to Reference Architecture
- Contains background information on the abstracted PS-CA actors and transactions for the Pan-Canadian Patient Summary Interoperable Specifications, describes baseline information on the recommended IHE profiles, and includes links to the IHE source documentation where stakeholders can get additional details on each PS-CA actor and transaction.
- Includes descriptions of alternatives and choices for implementation patterns and ecosystem architectures to support the PS-CA in current state, including sequence diagrams that demonstrate the relationship and dependencies between the PS-CA actors and transactions.
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- Addresses standardized sharing of vital patient information for the benefit of health care providers and patients using FHIR based information exchange.
- Similar to, and accomplishes the same objectives as, a Health Information Exchange (HIE).
- The first priority of this specification will be to define a document exchange interface for CA:FeX, clearly defining how a FHIR document can be transacted with a Clinical Data Repository.
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patient summaries. The CA:FeX specification promotes FHIR RESTful exchange patterns that can be applied on top of existing non-FHIR infrastructure and FHIR servers. These two specification packages support secure exchange of a patient’s health summary document, are represented using the normative release 4.0.1 of the HL7® FHIR® standard, and are closely aligned to the International Patient Summary specification (IPS).
While all jurisdictions have collaborated on the design and review of the patient summary specification, Alberta and Ontario are leading implementation efforts beginning in 2023; other jurisdictions will leverage their learnings. The national and provincial Patient Summary specifications (PS-CA/PS-AB/PS-ON) are harmonized. Vendors should be able to build a single codebase for implementation across multiple provinces, supporting small differences through configuration.
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On October 17th, 2022, the Specifications package was approved by the Interoperability Executive Table to be adopted and used by jurisdictions and vendors for Trial Implementation*. *The Trial Implementation maturity-level designation indicates that a specification is deemed ready for trial implementation in production systems for limited scale projects to meet a health care interoperability need. It has been cycled through public open review periods with jurisdictions and industry partners with all feedback dispositioned, changes incorporated and where appropriate, backlog items identified for a future release. A TI designated specification has been tested and validated, at a Projectathon, where implementers collaborate to test their solutions using methodologies and tools that accelerate interoperability and verify that the specification is deemed ready for trial implementation. Trial implementation is one step closer in the evolution of a final specification, when it is deemed ready for certification. |
Testing & Tools Overview
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Vendors had an opportunity to test and demonstrate capabilities in two distinct areas of the specification:
- Document format and content
- Secure, exchange transactions
1. Document format and content
The PS-CA FHIR Content Data model was tested using a combination of test data and validation tooling.
- The PS-ON specifications are very closely aligned to the PS-CA and should be supported by minimal configuration of capability in the vendor systems.
- The test cases highlight where configuration is needed and test that it is applied properly, based on claimed vendor conformance.
- The Projectathon offered an assessment of the FHIR document against the ON implementation guidance as represented in the PS-ON specifications, in addition to the PS-CA.
2. Secure, exchange transactions
This area of testing focused on validating the recommended secure exchange methods of the FHIR summary document as presented in the Reference Architecture (RA v0.1.1 DFT), linked to the PS-CA and CA:FeX specifications.
Implementation patterns may differ from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and information exchange channels may vary in terms of their security footprint. Therefore, the Projectathon test cases have been organized into two categories:
| Category 1: Test cases that test individual actor capabilities in isolation E.g., how a system can handle encrypted transactions, how a system can handle a CA:FeX transaction, how a system can handle an OAuth 2 token exchange, etc. |
| Category 2: Complex test cases that group individual actor capabilities with other relevant actor capabilities to simulate real world scenarios. E.g., how a patient summary creator system can submit the document to a repository by using an OAuth 2 integration, etc. |
Training, Tools & Support Overview
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Infoway provided training webinars to support the use of the tools and integrations with the Gazelle test framework. Once registered, vendors were provided with early access to the Gazelle platform for self / pre-Projectathon testing. In addition to Gazelle, Infoway provided a number of testing tools, including Simulators, Emulators and Validators to support the exchange patterns listed in the PS-CA specification. A test package was provided including scenarios for single tests and group testing, along with data set to support document format and content validation for the PS-CA and PS-ON.
For more details about each of these topics, please visit the following pages: Early Access / Registration, Training & Test Tools, Test Cases, Test Data Sets
Projectathon Results
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Projectathon results were collected into a report on the individual and group actor transactions that vendor systems have proven capabilities in supporting.
- This feature capability assessment will support jurisdictional integration efforts in assessing vendors conformance to their respective deployment models.
- Results can be analyzed from the relevant actor/transactions that align to local architectures.
Projected Benefit for Vendors
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Registration
Participants were required to register for the Projectathon via the Gazelle test platform. The registration period was open from January 20 - February 21, 2022. A registration webinar was held on January 20, 2022 at 11AM ET. This webinar included an overview of the:
- Scope of the Projectathon, including profiles and use cases
- Gazelle tool
- Registration in Gazelle
- How the Projectathon will be organized
- Relevant documentation, including specifications and training materials
Click here to register to Gazelle Test Management.
Pre-Projectathon Preparations
For successful participation in the Projectathon, pre-Projectathon tests and connectivity tests are important.
The purpose of the Pre-Projectathon tests are to help vendors:
Test their IHE profile implementation in their system using the virtual systems in Gazelle to find and fix issues;
Improve the quality of their tests prior to the Projectathon; and
Help familiarize themselves with the Gazelle tool prior to the Projectathon, including how to access and use Gazelle simulators to perform the tests.
The Pre-Projectathon Test period was open from February 17 - March 11, 2022. A Pre-Projectathon Test webinar was held on February 17, 2022 at 11AM ET. During this webinar, participants were shown how to access and use Gazelle in order to perform the tests.
The profiles that were tested during the Projectathon were:
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In addition to the pre-Projectathon tests, there was a Connectivity Testing period from March 1 - March 11, 2022. The purpose of a Connectivity Testing period is to check, in advance, whether participants' systems are configured and ready to communicate with other vendor systems during the Projectathon event. A Connectivity Testing webinar was held on March 1, 2022 at 11AM ET.
Tools
Gazelle Testing Platform
The pan-Canadian Interoperability Gazelle Platform is available at https://pancanadianIO.ca. From the home page, you may access the documentation for various support tools, test tools, and utilities, by clicking on the respective PDF icon.
Testing Tools
To support participants' Pre-Projectathon testing, the following tools were developed:
- An OpenAPI User Interface for the PS-CA APIs, including the MHD and the CA:FeX options
- A PS-CA FHIR Renderer used to visualize PS-CA FHIR bundles provided as JSON structured data
A review of these tools was presented during the Overview of Tools Webinar on February 25, 2022 at 11AM ET.
Information Sheets and Videos
Below you will find some information to support registration for the Projectathon:
Get Support
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InfoCentral Collaboration Group for Patient Summaries - Topic: Projectathon March 2022 Support
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