The July HIT Standards Committee Meeting

Farzad Mostashari, national coordinator for healthcare IT, began the meeting with a discussion of the issues we have always faced while harmonizing standards.  Standards that are widely adopted by the marketplace and are well tested make harmonization easy.  However, many standards are mature but not widely adopted or novel but not well tested.   We want to encourage innovation and use market adoption as a measure of our success.   It's clear that at times we'll have to consider new standards that seem very reasonable for the purpose intended and test them in real world scenarios before forcing top down adoption through regulation.   Bottom up adoption of standards that are implemented and improved by stakeholders is a better approach.  

Per the Standards Summer Camp schedule, the July HIT Standards Committee meeting focused on

Vocabulary recommendations
ePrescribing of discharged medications recommendations
Patient Matching recommendations
Syndromic Surveillance recommendations

Jim Walker, chair of the Clinical Quality workgroup, presented an overview of the vocabulary work done to support all our clinical coordination and quality measurement activities.  The charter for the group was to select the minimum number of vocabulary standards with the minimum number of values to meet the requirements of meaningful use stages 2 and 3.   Reducing the number of standards makes mapping between different vocabularies much easier.    The workgroup used SNOMED-CT and LOINC wherever possible and tried to select one vocabulary per domain (allergies, labs, medications etc).   Examples of their selections include

Adverse Drug effect - RxNorm for medications, SNOMED-CT for non-medication substances, SNOMED-CT for severity of reaction

Patient characteristics - ISO 639-2 for preferred language, HL7 for administrative gender, PHIN-VADS (Centers for Disease Control) for Race/Ethnicity

Condition/Diagnosis/Problem - SNOMED-CT

Non-lab Diagnostic study - LOINC for name, SNOMED-CT for appropriate findings, UCUM for Units

A rich discussion followed.  Points of concern included:
*Using RxNorm for all medications including vaccines, even though CVX is the required vaccine vocabulary for Meaningful Use stage 1.   We clarified this with an example from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center:

BIDMC uses First Data Bank as the medication vocabulary for its internal systems.  However, when BIDMC sends clinical summaries, it maps FDB to RxNorm for all drug names.  When BIDMC sends immunization records to public health, it uses CVX codes.   Thus, the HIT Standards Committee will not specify the vocabularies used within enterprise applications, just those vocabularies that are needed for specific purposes when data is transmitted between entities.

Next, Doug Fridsma began a discussion of our Summer Camp items, noting the many projects of the S&I framework are proceeding according to plan.

Scott Robertson presented the work of the Discharge Medications Power Team.  They recommended HL7 and NCPDP script as reasonable standards for sending discharge medication orders to hospital pharmacies and retail pharmacies.

Discussion followed regarding two specific points - their recommendations did not include a specific version of HL7, since existing Medicare Part D regulations do not specify an HL7 version.  The power team will make additional more specific HL7 recommendations.   There was discussion about the  specific aspects of RxNorm that constrain the way dose and route are specified.   The HIT Standards Committee members felt additional work was needed before mandating this level of specificity, so our recommendations will include RxNorm for medication name, but not additional specificity for dose and route vocabularies at this time.

Next, Marc Overhage presented the recommendations of the Patient Matching Power Team.   The scope of the Patient Matching work is to provide guidance to implementers who want to understand best practices for the use of demographics in machine to machine matching of patient identity.   Per the RAND Report, use of different fields results in variation of specificity and sensitivity.   Some fields such as social security number (or a subset of it) greatly increase specificity, resulting in fewer false positives such as matching the wrong patient.   However, social security number is controversial because of the potential for identity theft and the fact that immigrants may not have one.   The final report will take into account all these observations.

Chris Chute presented the recommendations of the Surveillance Implementation Guide Power Team, which aims to specify one implementation guide for each public health transaction.  They are studying the difference between HL7 2.31 and 2.51 as well as considering the potential for public health entities to use CDA constructs.

Dixie Baker presented a project plan for the NwHIN Power Team, which aims to specify a set of building blocks for secure transport of data in multiple architectures.

Finally, Judy Murphy and Liz Johnson presented their plans for the Implementation Workgroup, collecting lessons learned from  certification and attestation.

We're on track with Summer Camp.  Our next meeting in August will include the final recommendations for

Simple Lab Results
Transitions of Care
CDA Cleanup
Patient Matching
Vocabulary

Every meeting with the HIT Standards Committee (this was our 27th) brings us closer as a working team.   We're transparent and passionate, openly sharing all the issues and concerns about the standards we're selecting.  Coordination with all the moving parts (ONC, Policy Committee, S&I Framework)  keeps getting better and better.

Thus far, Summer Camp is a winner and I am confident we'll meet all our September deadlines for offering recommendations to ONC in preparation for Meaningful Use Stage 2 regulations.