B2 International

B2 International (B2i) develops extensible open-source frameworks and tools to simplify the exchange of healthcare information. By developing robust commercial-quality tools for healthcare standards such as HL7, openEHR, and SNOMED CT, B2i supports governmental and industry initiatives to lower the barrier to building a healthcare infrastructure. Our tools are used by standards organizations and governments around the world for creating, maintaining, and conformance testing electronic health records (EHRs). Many of these tools are developed as sponsored open-source through the English National Health Service (NHS) Connecting for Health (CFH) program, the HL7 (Health Level 7) Tooling Collaborative, the Eclipse Open Healthcare Framework, and Open Health Tools. Our tools and technology improve and support semantic interoperability between different EHR standards. Our tools rely heavily upon model-to-model transformations of not only EHR components, but also vocabularies and data types - critical success factors to meeting interoperability requirements. An example of our work in this area is our HL7 Static Model Designer, funded by CFH and available as open-source software from the Open Health Tools consortium. Similarly relevant is our expertise in improving EHR quality and safety through conformance testing. We test not only isolated models, but as well their entire pedigree to the reference models upon which they originate. This allows us to identify syntactic and semantic errors and incompatibilities before the EHR models are deployed. In addition to work on the HL7 Static Model Designer, our work in this area includes EHR instance validators, EHR model conformance test tools, and graphical EHR model comparison tools.