Clinical Quality Workgroup Update

The HIT Standards Committee Clinical Quality Workgroup met today to discuss the status of the recommendations of the Essential Components (Value Set) Tiger Team, and the Optimal Characteristics Tiger Team.

The Essential Components Tiger Team has pretty much completed our initial scope of work, resulting in four recommendations:

1. Establish NLM as a single authority for the validation of value sets used in Stage 2 quality measures.
2. ONC should expedite recommendations of the Implementation Workgroup (Jan 2012) and Vocabulary Task Force (April 2010) related to establishment of a publicly available value set repository.
3. The value set repository established by NLM should build upon the IHE Sharing Value Sets (SVS) profile for storing and serving value sets, and incorporate Common Terminology Service 2 (CTS2) methods for managing vocabularies referenced by value sets.
4. Establish a web service for human and machine consumption of Meaningful Use 2 value sets. Consider NLM, AHRQ, or CDC as the Internet host for validated value sets.

Some of the interesting points made on the call today:

1. The value set format selected describes the expanded value set, rather than the definition.  Looking forward, there should be a way to express the definition of a value set also.
2. ONC should consider making available a forum where the public can report issues and/or questions raised about value sets.  That forum should be publicly available so that the public can also see what the status of current issues are, and what if any resolutions or answers are available.

You can find the slides below.

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