Organization Profile
Lantana Consulting Group
Organization Overview
Lantana Consulting Group provides services and software for standards-based health information exchange. We have built our expertise through more than a decade of involvement in standards development and deployment.
We focus on design and implementation of Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) compliant systems, including validation, document management, authoring, data conversion and web services for information exchange. We support these implementations with extensive background and depth in Extensible Markup Language (XML), health care terminologies and project management.
Increasingly, our work is focusing on deriving the benefits of EHR data management through quality, comparative effectiveness and public health reporting, research and meaningful use.
As a distributed company, with no single brick and mortar office, Lantana Group can hire the best available talent.
Organization History
The company was established in 2005 as Alschuler Associates, LLC (AALLC) at the time when Liora was seeing demand for greater, more diverse services than she could support on her own.
The first employees, Bob Yencha, Rick Geimer and Kate Hamilton, were colleagues who shared a background in XML and brought fresh perspective to health information technology. They were soon joined by others with clinical and informatics training. Together, we have worked all aspects of clinical information exchange, developing standards and the tools and utilities that make them implementable.
In 2008, Bob Dolin, MD, left Kaiser Permanente to take up full-time consulting. At that point, Bob and Liora had already collaborated for ten years as HL7 volunteers and agreed to work together when they met at the Spring HL7 meeting in Phoenix. The site of the agreement was the Lantana Bar & Grill. They have always referred to the working relationship as “the Lantana agreement.” It has worked out well, and so they opted to formalize the relationship under that banner when Bob joined the company on January 1, 2011.
Notable Clients
CDC, Harris Corporation, National Cancer Institute, National Quality Forum
Notable Accomplishments / Recognition
We are proud of our record of innovation. Among the “firsts” we have supported are:
•Introduction of XML as the exchange syntax for HL7, the first to adopt it in healthcare
•Development of the Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) from concept to implementation
•Introduction of the use of Schematron for CDA validation
•Development of the online CDA Validator
•introduction of the concept of “greenCDA” and development of the ballot, initial samples and transforms
•Development of the first application of CDA for public health reporting for CDC’s National Healthcare Safety Network
•Development of a series of implementation guides reusing CCD templates in the Health Story Project
•Development of the open source Template Database (Tdb) for CDA templates in use by CDC, NCI, others
•Drafting of the first approach to standards-based quality reporting from the EHR in the Quality Reporting Document Architecture (QRDA)
•Development under the auspices of the National Quality Forum (NQF) and in conjunction with AMA and others of the standard Healthcare Quality Measure Format (HQMF, also known as eMeasure)
•Publishers of Modular CDA XSL StyleSheets
•Founders of CDA Academy – the only option for comprehensive training for HL7 CDA and CCD