After incorporating feedback from industry and the public, the Sequoia Project released the Data Usability Implementation Guide version 2, created by the Interoperability Matters Data Usability Workgroup.
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT
The national non-profit IT Interoperability Organization DUWG develops specific and pragmatic implementation guidelines for clinical content for healthcare stakeholders to facilitate the exchange of health information.
The additions in the updated guide are intended to promote data usability across HIE vendors, implementers, networks, governance frameworks and testing programs, said Didi Davis, Sequoia Project vice president of informatics, compliance and interoperability and DUWG leader.
The revised resource covers seven topics, including:
- Origin of data and traceability of changes.
- Effective use of codes in shared information.
- Reducing the impact of duplicates.
- Data integrity and trust.
- Data tagging and searchability.
- Effective use of stories for usability.
- Laboratory data interoperability.
“Following industry feedback, many important changes have been made to this version of the Implementation Guide, including additional guidance for receiving systems, advanced core requirements from USCDI V1, and more,” Davis said in a statement.
These include:
- Added guidance for receiving systems in addition to sending systems.
- Advancing the basic requirements of USCDI V1 (problem, allergy, medications, immunizations only) to all data classes within USCDI V3.
- Extensive guidance for being technology agnostic with added requirements for HL7® FHIR®, HL7 v2.x and HL7 C-CDA in the subject categories.
- Added atopic category for laboratory.
Dr. Adam Davis, physician informaticist at Sutter Health and co-chair of DUWG, worked hard and collaborated on the revision.
The working group, which started working on the Implementation manual version 2.0 last year and released the design revision also launched a team in July to gather laboratory guidelines from industry experts and incorporate that feedback into this final version.
THE BIG TREND
The DUWG was launched in October 2020 to focus on data usability requirements for provider-to-provider, provider-to-public healthcare entity, and healthcare entity-to-consumer information exchange.
The working group, with approximately 360 members, published the Implementation Manual Version 1.0 in 2022.
“This data usability implementation guide can enable semantic interoperability between sending and receiving systems to more directly incorporate shared data into a clinician’s workflow and paves the way for accurate and reliable communications so that the data exchanged is more computable for clinical decision support and more actionable,” Davis said on the initial release.
Through a partnership with the American Health Information Management Association, the Sequoia Project also provides technical assistance, testing support and facilitation to make the data exchanged between organizations more computable and actionable through a data usability initiative.
The Data Usability Taking Root initiative, launched last year, focuses on improving the quality and usability of health information that end users receive within their workflows. Early members included Azuba, Civitas Networks for Health, Epic, Foothold Technologies, HCA, Health Gorilla, HIMSS Electronic Health Record Association, Kno2, MedAllies, New York eHealth Collaborative and Optum are some of the new ones,
ON THE RECORD
“We look forward to continuing to identify and resolve barriers to improving data usability,” said Dr. William Gregg, vice president of clinical data and interoperability at HCA Healthcare and co-chairman of DUWG, said in a statement.
Andrea Fox is editor-in-chief of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.