About

What is ART-DECOR?

ART-DECOR in four bullet points is...

• ...is an open-source tool and a methodology for various multidisciplinary stakeholders of healthcare information exchange
• ...supports comprehensive collaboration of team members within and between governance groups
• ...allows separation of concerns and different views on one single documentation for different domain experts
• ...supports creation and maintenance of HL7 templates (DSTU), value sets, data sets and more

DECOR (Data Elements, Codes, OIDs and Rules) is a methodology to record the information model used by health professionals. DECOR uses this model to generate various artifacts: documentation, XML- and test-tooling, etc. With DECOR it is possible to improve the recorded information model by generating and resolving issues per item. DECOR registers (amongst others) datasets, datatypes, valuesets, codes, identifications, and business rules. The underlying data-format is XML. Generation of HTML-documentation and XML-materials is possible through transformations with stylesheets.

DECOR consists of two parts:

• DECOR methodology: a framework to model artifacts (including documentation)
• DECOR software: XML-schemas, XML-schematrons, XML-stylesheets.

ART (Advanced Requirement Tooling) is the DECOR user interface to create and adapt DECOR files, and to generate artifacts from DECOR files. ART is based on the eXist XML database, XQuery and Orbeon XForms.

Who benefits from ART-DECOR?

With ART-DECOR, experts with different backgrounds, such as healthcare professionals, terminologists, architects, designers and programmers together enter the necessary data, iteratively improve and connect those, all using the same underlying data store. ART-DECOR registers datasets, data types, value sets, identifications, codes, business rules, (HL7v3) templates and contains version management

Use it for what?

ART-DECOR can be used by:

• Regional and national networks for data exchange in healthcare.
• Larger healthcare institutions or collaborations to improve the internal data exchanges.
• Software vendors in healthcare looking for simpler ways to implement complex specifi-cations.
• IT service providers in healthcare such as ASPs.
• All parties who facilitate complex data exchanges or data stores in healthcare.

Use it for free!

ART DECOR is 100% free and:

• Is the basis for capturing data definitions in healthcare.
• Contains tools for governance and version management.
• Supports various forms of publication.
• Contains issue management to iteratively improve data definitions.
• Enables and simplifies the creation and validation of examples and test scenarios.
• Generates a web page on the fly to enter examples for each dataset.
• Contains tools for conformance testing of participating parties.
• Can be used by others as a basis for the construction of code generators, automatic questionnaires, user interfaces, conversions of data formats, database diagrams and much more.

Used in practice!

ART DECOR is used right now in Germany, Austria, Norway, Lithuania and the Netherlands, among others, at Nictiz (the National Healthcare Standards Institute) and RIVM (the National Healthcare Authority).

Take a look at

• the demonstration #3 of ART-DECOR - Demo 3: Electrocardiogram Report as a Minimal CDA Document (switch to English language)
• the DECOR site at Nictiz (in Dutch)
• or download ART-DECOR from SourceForge.

A public ART-DECOR instance online is also available, which features a sandbox and demo environment. If you want to "play" with this project go to Sandbox: EKG Report CDA Document.

You need to log in before working in the sandbox. Use username demo and password demodemo. Please note that all changes to this project will be overwritten every day at 0300 Coordinated Universal Time UTC. We apologize to users who are in a time zone where this is in the middle of the day.