Archive for the ‘Healthcare Standards’ Category

The primary characteristic of a CDA document is that it must be readable by humans. The CDA specification states that, “human readability guarantees that a receiver of a CDA document can algorithmically display the clinical content of the note on a standard Web browser.” This requirement means that a clinician or patient can take a [...]

On September 9, the Health IT Policy Committee submitted a letter to the National Coordinator for Health IT, Dr. Farzad Mostashari, with recommendations for vocabulary standards. The committee recommends adopting and incorporating a smaller set of vocabulary standards into the Stage 2 certification requirements for Electronic Health Records (EHRs) Meaningful Use. The ONC offered a [...]

As a service provider, you might have requested documentation from a vendor. As a vendor, you may be searching for documentation regarding a specific client install. Either way, you are looking for some information that helps you do your job (i.e., implementing, supporting, changing or fixing an interface). To that end, what is the documentation [...]

A few months ago I wrote about the ELINCS EDGE testing tool, a free program that allows you to easily test your interfaces against ELINCS compliant HL7 result messages.  For those unfamiliar with the existing standard, ELINCS (EHR-Lab Interoperability and Connectivity Specification) is an HL7 v2.x based message profile used for the reporting of lab [...]

On Wednesday, e-pateints.net posted a guest blog by Cynthia Lott Vogel titled, “I’m getting impatient”: an empowered patient guest post, that discussed her personal experience as a patient diagnosed with a number of health ailments, and her physicians’ care of those ailments. Cynthia had a number of concerns regarding the humanistic characteristics of her care. [...]

Stay up-to-date on healthcare IT news by following these leaders in the healthcare community on twitter.

If you really want to know, Glen Marshall wrote an excellent overview of how Healthcare Standards become Healthcare Standards. It is a paper published by AHIMA, and it is entitled The Standards Value Chain. It provides an excellent overview of the process and result. Just remember what Mark Victor Hansen has said: “Don’t wait until [...]

HL7 Quality Reporting Document Architecture (QRDA) is in the IFR for Meaningful Use, so it may be time to brush up on what it all means, especially in relation to quality reporting requirements.

John D. Halamka (CIO at Beth Israel Deaconess MC and Harvard Medical School) provides excellent summary of the IFR: “The rule is the right mixture of harmonization and compromise. Not every stakeholder will be happy with it, but it is good enough. It moves us all forward toward the goal of less optionality, more constraints, [...]

Changing healthcare standards may not be an option in defining Meaningful Use, but using government-developed software applications may not be the best standard for innovation and achieving results in facilitating high quality patient care and effective healthcare interoperability.