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Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Top 10 HealthIT Standards Efforts of 2011

This is my list of the top 10 standards efforts of 2011 that will have an impact on Healthcare IT in the coming years.  Several of these efforts are still works in progress and bear watching as they complete in 2012.  Others should bear fruit in 2012.  I've put them in reverse order by importance as I see it, which is not necessarily how I expect anyone else to view these:

10.  CDA Templates for Imaging
HL7, DICOM and IHE are all working together on developing CDA Templates for documenting imaging procedures.  I don't really know what the initiative is called, but I know it started in DICOM.  Even though I still claim to know nothing about DICOM, it's on my list because I think having a consistent way to document clinical encounters is extremely important.

9. IHE Reconciliation of Problems, Medications and Allergies
This is an IHE Profile for which I was the principal editor.  It describes what a system needs to consider when reconciling information from multiple information sources, and how it can document the fact that information has been reconciled, and from which sources.

8. Clinical Information Modeling Initiative
I wrote a post about this a couple of days ago.  This initiative was first discussed by the HL7 Fresh Look task force.  The idea is that they will be developing a set of detailed clinical information models.  It includes leaders in clinical modeling efforts from ISO, HL7 and openEHR.

7. ONC S&I Framework Laboratory Reporting Initiative
Finally, we'll have a single guide for reporting laboratory results. It's still being reconciled as far as I know (it got over 700 comments, which means that there is a great deal of interest).

6. HL7 Virtual Medical Record (VMR)
The VMR is a concept that has been discussed for over a decade in clinical decision support circles.  Several folks in HL7 have finally gotten together and published a proposal for what it would really look like.

5. ONC S&I Framework Query Health
If you read this blog, you know as much as I do about Query Health.  It's still a work in progress, but could have huge impact on the "learning healthcare system". The basic idea is about how to send the query to the data.


4. Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (Formerly: Resources for Health)
Grahame Grieve's response to the HL7 Fresh Look task force is being seriously (if slowly) examined by HL7.  It's definately a fresh look.

3. HL7 CDA Consolidation Guide
The CDA Consolidation guide is an HL7 project, but it was funded in part by the ONC S&I Framework initiative, and included formal participation from IHE.  The guide is now published (check the bottom of the page at the link above).  You can look forward to a January post from me on how it differs from the current HITSP C32.

2. IHE Cross Enterprise Document Workflow
This is a novel way of addressing ad-hoc workflow, which is endemic in medicine.  It solves the problem  of tracking what has been done for a patient.  If you are thinking about forming an ACO, you should take a look at this one, because it supports just the kind of service tracking that ACO's need in order to ensure their patients are receiving quality care.

1. HTML5 and Microdata
These promise not only to revolutionize the next generation of the web, but also healthcare if I get my way.  I want to use HTML5 to represent clinical documents, and microdata to represent the machine readable clinical content.


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