Health Level Seven, an accredited standards organization working on a set of standards for electronic health records, has signed an agreement with the Object Management Group to form a strategic collaboration.

The two groups said they would work together on electronic healthcare standards, including electronic drug prescribing, and patient record interoperability infrastructure.

"This strategic relationship will ensure the rapid development and deployment of standards to lower healthcare systems interoperability costs while increasing safety," said Richard Soley, chairman and CEO of Needham, Mass.-based OMG. "Everyone benefits because both end users and vendors will be able to converge around one standard."

The two groups say they will work together to ensure the electronic health record standard will enable improvements in patient safety, with components that provide interoperability, authentication of requests and backward compatibility of existing EHR applications.

Soley said a task force will meet in early November to select the first set of joint specifications to be published. There's a lot of interest surrounding summary healthcare records, and that specific application of HL7's electronic health records standards also is piquing the interest of the office of David Brailer, the nation's healthcare IT coordinator.

The agreement will enable OMG to leverage its expertise with the Unified Modeling Language along with its Model Driven Architecture to support interoperability within healthcare. In return, OMG will rely on HL7's Reference Information Model and HL7's Development Framework for OMG's service standards.

OMG's new version of its unified modeling language will be available soon, and the agreement will ensure that it will work with all applicable HL7 standards, Soley said.

HL7 already incorporates OMG's unified modeling language expertise to implement its Reference Information Model and it's associated methodologies to develop standard information models for healthcare and healthcare-related domains, including healthcare-related administrative, financial and research areas.

"HL7 has used, and will continue to use UML as a key foundation element of our methodology for creating standard information models, bound to standard vocabularies, in support of semantic interoperability of healthcare and healthcare-related information," said HL7 Board Chairman Mark Shafarman.