US Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI)

See the following -

3 Global Health IT Takeaways You Need to Know - Reflections from ONC 3rd Interoperability Forum

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) engages in several global health IT projects from a United States government perspective. ONC works with global counterparts to share experiences, and ensure alignment between global interoperability efforts and the United States' approaches to interoperability. This includes working through worldwide partnerships, bi-lateral and multi-lateral engagements, global networks, and memoranda of understanding. Through these engagements, we focus on advancing common health data standards for global interoperability, enhancing individuals' access to their data, progressing healthcare providers' experiences, and improving factors associated with transparency and competition.

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AHRQ Releases Draft Guide for Registry Interoperability: Does Public Health Have a Role?

On January 11, 2019, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) released a draft Addendum to the Third Edition of Registries for Evaluating Patient Outcomes: A User's Guide called Tool and Technologies for Registry Interoperability. AHRQ has long written about registries - largely from a research standpoint - and I have been following this from afar for some time. This new guide is focused on helping those who both create and use registries understand the issue surrounding leveraging external data to improve registry completeness, accuracy, and usefulness. This report covers lots of ground and does a good job of summarizing important subtopics. Each chapter is overflowing with footnotes and sources.

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Feature Overlaps Between Immunization Information Systems and EHRs

Immunization Information Systems (IIS) have been around for nearly twenty years. Their functionality, completeness, and usefulness have all increased over this time. IIS and electronic health record (EHR) systems have always had unique features, as well as some overlapping features, and the deployment of EHRs has enhanced the local immunization capabilities of clinician practices. Several critical clinical features that are considered to be core functions of IIS are beginning to be supported by EHRs. This article will review and discuss five such critical features: online data entry, clinical decision support for immunization, reminder-recall, practice-level assessment of up-to-date status, and patient access to their immunization data.

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ONC Gets It Mostly Right with TEFCA 2.0

On April 17, 2019 the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) released the second draft of its Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA) for comment. The initial version was released more than a year ago in January 2018 (see my original blog). As before, this is in response to a requirement imposed by Congress in the 21 Century Cures Act. After a somewhat lengthy (but well written) introduction, the document contains three parts (compared to just two parts the first time around)...

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ONC Releases Several New Specifications in 2022

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) started off the new year by releasing several new specifications supporting health information interoperability...On January 3, 2022 ONC released the Version 3 Draft of the US Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI) which defines a core set of data for common interoperability transactions in healthcare. It defines classes of data as well as specific data elements within those classes and represents the data that can be expected to be shared at minimum between data partners. While public health is included, ONC has recently recognized that public health use cases (and therefore their data needs) differ from clinical care use cases...

ONC's Trusted Exchange—A Public Health Perspective

In January 2018 the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) issued a draft Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA), and related supporting documents, in response to a requirement imposed by Congress in the 21st Century Cures Act. The Act says that the TEF may include a common method for authenticating users, a common set of rules, enabling policies, and a process for managing non-compliance. Nowhere does the Act instruct ONC to determine an actual technical architecture in this process, though such a step is not precluded either. The primary document is in two parts: Part 1 is a set of principles that set the foundation for Part 2 which is a set if minimum terms and conditions for trusted exchange.

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US Core Data for Interoperability Task Force Delivers its Recommendations

On April 18, 2018 the HHS Health Information Technology Advisory Committee (HITAC) US Core Data for Interoperability Task Force delivered its recommendations on the draft US Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI) and Proposed Expansion Process which had been published for public comment back in January 2018. HITAC promptly accepted the Task Force’s recommendations. The Task Force focused almost exclusively on the process for identifying the USCDI rather than the proposed USCDI data itself. I especially appreciated their introduction of some key concepts related to how USCDI should be organized and understood.

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