The March HIT Standards Committee Meeting

The March HIT Standards Committee focused on streamlining test scripts for certification, an overview of FDA Universal Device Identifier rule making, clinical summary formats for Long Term Care, and the latest updates from ONC.

We began the meeting by reflecting on the recent HIMSS conference, noting that the culture and momentum for EHR and HIE adoption in the US have changed to the point that there is no longer of question achieving our meaningful use attestation goals.

Liz Johnson and Cris Ross provided an overview of the implementation workgroup review of testing scenarios.     Their goal has been to increase the clinical relevance and decrease the burden of testing for certification.   A scenario-based sequence approach enables the reuse of data across multiple tests are part of continuum of functional evaluation.    Part of the work of this group is to ensure the tools provided for testing (9 different tools for Meaningful Use Stage 2) work well and that pre-testing entry of data is allowed, reducing the time of testing procedures substantially.

Next, Terrie Reed presented the FDA's Unique Device Identifiers work.   She discussed the two standards that would be used - GMDN for categories of devices and the use of globally unique identifier for each product (GUDID).   Her analogy to medication vocabulary standards is that GMDN is like RxNorm (a chemical name) and GUDID is like NDC (a specific package size).   She also noted that the regulation will include all medical devices.   The standards committee advised her that the regulation should cover consumer devices used for healthcare as well, so that EHRs and PHRs can be more easily interfaced to consumer devices.

Bill Russell and Larry Garber presented an excellent overview of Long-term Care Coordination standards work, noting that CCDA would benefit from additional templates.

Finally, Judy Murphy and Doug Fridsma presented ONC Updates.

Over the next month, the Standards Committee members will continue their workgroup efforts to select foundational standards for Meaningful Use Stage 3.    I look forward to our next meeting.