Principles for HealthIT Standards Selection

Last Thursday the Clinical Quality Workgroup met to finish the discussion we started in October on principles for standards selection.  We reviewed the following single slide in detail and verified that these are indeed the right questions to be asking about standards that we recommend as a workgroup.

This is a really nice reduction of our discussions to a very simple, easy to use assessment that any HIT Standards Committee workgroup can use to assess readiness of a standard for use in certification processes. This material is based on past work from NIST (for Smart Grid standards) and IHE (for standards selection used in IHE profiles) and HITSP (e.g., the Tier 2 spreadsheet).  The Clinical Quality workgroup will be using this assessment going forward for its recommendations to the HIT Standards Committee, and I personally hope that other committees adopt this assessment process as well.