ISO/IEC DIS 29500 (Formally known as Office Open XML)

Office Open XML file format has been approved by ISO as a standard. I had a small peripheral part in this event and am looking back at that time wondering (and sort of hoping) that we will have that sort of excitement and life in other standards discussions in my lifetime. Standards have always been dry and dusty and in the realms of nerds like me - not so this submission. It took on a life of its own and, from my point of view, this made it a better submission and standard than it could ever have been had people not gotten involved.

Firstly I really need to say thank you to the many people I came in contact with during the past year who shared their views of the issues with the OOXML structure during the submission process and argued points with me (having to explaining their views in detail as I started out with a very superficial view of its structure) - these people help shape the OOXML submission in that I took their points to Microsoft with me and they, along with all other more formal submissions, were taken into account in the internal process of submitting it to what it is now: "ISO/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology - Office Open XML file formats"

I joined Microsoft just over 12 months ago and found myself right in the middle of one of the most interesting and informative eras in all my years of involvement with healthcare and standards.

This ‘era' - which seemed like an eon many times during the year - was that of the submission of the Office Open XML format as a standard. I painted a bull's eye on my forehead early in the piece by putting forward the idea that OOXML could be used as an encapsulator for many different xml-based healthcare formats.  

The idea is quite simple; there are many systems with many different internal representations of xml to expose their document/record structures, there is the possibility that not all of these would be compatible to be transposed into such structures as denoted by standards (ASTM, HL7, etc), along with this is the possibility that many could also be able to present their information in standard ways (CDA, CCD, CCR, Archetypes) or even their own Standardised way (mypatients.xml). The question I posed to myself was "What do I have in my available arsenal that will allow me to easily manage all my records across multiple systems that each may or may not adhere to standards?" - The answer was quite simple "Office Open XML".

I ended up showing that it could be done using nothing more than Microsoft Word (2007) and some open source tools (from codeplex). Since the first presentation in New Zealand last year, I have demonstrated and spoken about it in Malaysia, Australia, Singapore, Indonesia and Japan. Until now this work has been largely theoretical as it was not based upon an international standard.

With the ISO approval of DIS 29500 I am hopeful that the work we have all been doing can move ahead and show how to do the same thing in ODF, PDF and UOF (Chinese Unified Office Format). I intend to publish my process and findings on msdn.microsoft.com this year and hope that others - with more expertise in the other document formats - will pick up and show that they are all able to achieve this result. Why? - Because true interoperability from a document perspective, in my view, comes from being able to exchange information between standard formats in such a way that the end result is identical to the original.