 Overview:
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. 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.
Industry
Need Addressed: Standards are vital to healthcare systems and
the deployment of information technologies for healthcare. This
has led to a flurry of standards development and deployment activities
by numerous accredited standards developing organizations, consortia,
trade associations, government agencies, and individual companies.
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/ITL
Approach: NIST/ITL is collaborating with industry, healthcare
informatics-related standards organizations, consortia, and government
agencies to build tools and prototypes to advance the adoption of
IT within healthcare systems. In particular, NIST/ITL researchers
are:
- Collaborating
with Health Level Seven (HL7) members to help ensure that HL7
messaging and EHR systems' conformance can be defined and measured
at an appropriate level.
- Providing
technical leadership on 'Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise'
(IHE) projects, in particular the Cross Enterprise Document Sharing
(XDS) Profile and medical device-related profiles.
- Providing
technical leadership to build a common web-based tool set that
integrates testing tools/activities of various SDOs, consortia
and other organizations.
- Actively
participating in the ANSI Health Information Technology Standards
Panel (HITSP), HL7, IEEE 11073, the American Telemedicine Association
and the eGov Federal Health Architecture to pursue these efforts.
Impact:
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.
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