Why This Matters
The non-profit nationwide health IT interoperability organization's DUWG is dedicated to providing specific and practical implementation guidance on clinical content. Didi Davis, the vice president of informatics, conformance, and interoperability and DUWG lead, emphasizes that the additions in the updated guide are crucial for advancing data usability. The revised resource covers seven key topics, such as data provenance and traceability of changes, effective use of codes in shared information, and reducing the impact of duplicates. These efforts are aimed at facilitating seamless health information exchange among HIE vendors, implementers, networks, governance frameworks, and testing programs.As Davis stated in a statement, "After feedback from the industry, many key changes were made to this version of the Implementation Guide, including added guidance for receiving systems, advanced baseline requirements from USCDI V1, and more." These changes include adding guidance for receiving systems in addition to sending systems, advancing the baseline requirements from USCDI V1 (problem, allergy, medications, immunizations only) to all data classes within USCDI V3, and expanding the guidance to be technology agnostic with added requirements for HL7® FHIR®, HL7 v2.x, and HL7 C-CDA across the topic categories. Additionally, an atopic category for laboratory has been added.
Dr. Adam Davis, the physician informaticist at Sutter Health and DUWG co-chair, highlights the significant amount of hard work and collaboration that went into the revision. The workgroup, which started working on the Implementation Guide Version 2.0 last year and released the draft revision in July, also established a team to collect laboratory guidance from industry subject matter experts and incorporate that feedback into the final version.
The Larger Trend
The DUWG was launched in October 2020 with the focus on data usability requirements for provider-to-provider, provider-to-public health agency, and healthcare entity-to-consumer information exchanges. With approximately 360 members, the workgroup published its Implementation Guide Version 1.0 in 2022. Davis emphasized that this data usability implementation guide can enable semantic interoperability between sending and receiving systems, allowing for more direct incorporation of shared data into the clinician's workflow and paving the way for accurate and reliable communication. Through a collaboration with the American Health Information Management Association, The Sequoia Project is providing technical assistance, testing support, and facilitation to make data exchanged among organizations more computable and actionable through a data usability initiative. The Data Usability Taking Root initiative, which launched last year, focuses on improving the quality and actionability of health information received by end users within their workflows. Initial members include Azuba, Civitas Networks for Health, Epic, Foothold Technologies, HCA, Health Gorilla, HIMSS Electronic Health Record Association, Kno2, MedAllies, New York eHealth Collaborative, and Optum.On the Record
Dr. William Gregg, the vice president of clinical data and interoperability at HCA Healthcare and DUWG co-chair, expressed enthusiasm for continuing to identify and solve barriers to improving data usability. He stated, "We look forward to working together to make significant strides in this area and ensure that health information is used to its fullest potential."