Health Information Technology

The demand for online medical information and simplified, standardized methods to access healthcare information and services is crucial in making healthcare safe and available to all. Appropriate standards for healthcare information and systems provide the cornerstone to achieving a healthy healthcare infrastructure. Throughout preliminary discussions between NIST and members of the healthcare community, a major theme has emerged ? the plethora of healthcare standards and the need for integrating the standards so that they work together, forming cohesive interoperable health enviornment. This project seeks to contribute to the healthcare industry by advancing healthcare information standards that are complete and testable and by providing the necessary conformance tests, tests tools and techniques where appropriate.

Standards are vital to healthcare systems and the deployment of information technologies for healthcare. The range of healthcare standards run a wide gamut and spans several tiers of the healthcare industry. There is a real need for formal and informal coordination of these efforts to leverage the synergy of the various efforts, to harmonize vocabularies, to enable interoperability, and to promote consistent testing and certification programs across and within organizations.

NIST is collaborating with industry, standards organizations, consortia, and government agencies to build tools and prototypes to advance the adoption of IT within healthcare systems. In particular, NIST is:

• Collaborating with HL7 to help ensure that HL7 messaging and EHR systems' conformance can be defined and measured at an appropriate level.
  
  
• Developing tools and prototypes to promote consistent definitions and artifact reuse and facilitate interoperability for healthcare systems.
  
  
• Collaborating with HIMSS Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise Project to develop a profile, Cross Enterprise Document Sharing, that will help ensure clinical document discovery and retrieval.
  
  
• Collaborating with healthcare informatics-related SDOs, consortia, and others to develop metadata and tools that will fully describe their organizations and activities so that further collaboration and coalescence can happen among the healthcare community.
  
  
• Actively participating in the ANSI Health Informatics Standards Boarad (HISB), HL7, HIMSS, American Telemedicine Association (ATA), and the Federal Health Architecture's Consolidated Health Informatics committee to pursue these efforts.

The creation of a healthy healthcare information infrastructure in the US depends on all parties involved; consumers, providers, researchers and insurers having systems, tools, and information that are complete, correct, secure and interoperable. The basis for achieving this rests with the availability of healthcare information standards that are complete and testable. The efforts of NIST/ITL can help move these standards and their implementation and acceptance forward.

Downloads

IHE Open Source Project: XDS software (html file)

Message Maker Prototype (html file)

Healthcare Standards Landscape (html file)

Healthcare Information Standards and Testing, A Concept Paper (pdf file)

Conformance Testing and Certification Framework, White Paper (pdf file)

What is This Thing Called Conformance, White Paper (html file)

Principles for Writing Conformance Criteria (pdf file)

Building HL7 EHR-S Conformance Criteria, Slide presentation (html file)