Today I got to present to the HIT Standards Clinical Quality Workgroup on principles for standards selection. I had raised the point at our last meeting that it would be good if, before we started selecting standards, we actually understood the principles behind which such a selection was made.
A lot of work has already been done in this area, as I reminded the workgroup. I started from first principles as to why consensus standards are desirable, moving to a derivation from NIST's Guiding Principles for Identifying Standards for Implementation as found in the Framework and Roadmap for Smart Grid Interoperability, and then on to principles found in HITSP's Tier 2 standards evaluation criteria, and the unwritten principles (now written down) for IHE standards selection, and the written principles for taking a profile to final text.
Then I gave an overview of the feedback I had received from many interested parties who responded to this post, or whom I found it interesting to talk to about the issue, including the guy who labels himself as "a dumb family doc" but is now sitting in the National Coordinator's seat (he wasn't at the time I asked). Next time around I get to summarize this into a strawman proposal for the workgroup (the reward for a job well-done is another job).
There was a really great question from the caller from AHRQ, which was related to the point I raised about what is our standards architecture for Meaningful Use. After all, if you don't plan one, it just sort of happens. I'm hoping we can discuss that on a future call. I have some idea about what sort of architecture could be extracted from that program.
The transcript will be posted later, and you can find the materials and a subsequent transcript of what was discussed on the HIT FACA Web Site. Here are my slides: