Health Care Standards Landscape
Tom Rhodes (Tom
Rhodes@nist.gov)
Overview:
The healthcare industry has many standards development organizations
(SDOs) developing specifications and standards to support healthcare
informatics, information exchange, systems integration, and a wide
spectrum of healthcare applications. The large number of healthcare
organizations and standards that exist, or are in-development, make
it difficult to monitor and track the overall landscape of healthcare
standards. In-turn, this impedes standards coordination and harmonization
efforts among SDOs, and frustrates efforts by users and organizations
to identify, understand, adopt, and deploy needed standards. Many
of these problems can be relieved, and collaboration and implementation
efforts improved, by improving the availability and dissemination
of healthcare standards information among developers, implementers,
and users of healthcare standards. The NIST Health Care Standards
Landscape (HCSL) project is supporting this need by providing a
Web capability that enables publishing and finding healthcare standards
information by stakeholders in the healthcare standards community.
Industry Need Addressed:
Development, adoption, and use of healthcare standards can be improved
by ensuring that developers and stakeholders (e.g. healthcare providers,
payers, suppliers, integrators, vendors, users, etc) are aware of
existing and ongoing healthcare standards' development and deployment
efforts. The NIST HCSL project is promoting increased awareness
and knowledge among stakeholders by developing and demonstrating
a Web-based tool and repository of information on healthcare standards,
organizations, and resources that can aid in development, coordination,
harmonization, implementation, adoption and use of healthcare standards.
NIST/ITL Approach:
NIST is collaborating with healthcare standards developers and stakeholders
to develop, test, and demonstrate the HCSL capability. In developing
the HSCL, NIST works with the ANSI Healthcare Information Standards
Panel (HITSP), the Agency for Health Research and Quality (AHRQ),
the e-Gov Consolidated Health Informatics (CHI) program, and the
National Alliance for Health Information Technology (NAHIT). NIST
also monitors and engages with other SDOs and healthcare organizations,
such as, ADA, IEEE-1073, HL7, and NCPDP. The HCSL tool and data
repository are available on the Web for healthcare standards' stakeholders
to search for and publish healthcare standards' information. NIST
plans to make an open-source version of the HCSL software available
for downloading and use by other organizations, and is exploring
the transfer and continued operation of the public HCSL capability
to an external organization.
Impact:
The HCSL provides a centralized, comprehensive source for finding
and publishing healthcare standards information over the Web. It includes
information on healthcare standards and their development organizations,
on organizations that use or implement HC standards, and other related
information. The HCSL also includes links to other healthcare standards
resources that are available on the Web. Thus, the HCSL information
supports development, implementation, and adoption of healthcare standards,
by enabling users, vendors, system developers, and integrators to
quickly find or publish relevant information on healthcare standards,
and to become more knowledgeable about healthcare standards, organizations,
and their healthcare standards' activities and applications.
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