List of Healthcare IT Trade Associations

Posted on May 6, 2022 by Dr. David Edward Marcinko MBA MEd CMP™

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To be efficient in healthcare delivery today, doctors must partner and understand the resources and affiliations that are available to them. Here is a brief list of several healthcare trade associations and leading industry vendors submitted for your review.

AHIMA
The American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) is the premier association of health information management professionals. AHIMA’s 51,000 members are dedicated to the effective management of personal health information needed to deliver quality healthcare to the public. Founded in 1928 to improve the quality of medical records, AHIMA is committed to advancing the health information management profession in an increasingly electronic and global environment through leadership in advocacy, education, certification, and lifelong learning.

EHRA
HIMSS EHRA is a trade association of Electronic Health Record (EHR) vendors that addresses national efforts to create interoperable EHRs in hospital and ambulatory care settings. HIMSS EHRA operates on the premise that the rapid, widespread adoption of EHRs will help improve the quality of patient care and the productivity of the healthcare system. The primary mission of the association is to provide a forum for the EHR vendor community relative to standards development, the EHR certification process, interoperability, performance and quality measures, and other EHR issues that may become the subject of increasing government, insurance and physician association initiatives and requests.

HIMSS
HIMSS (Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society) is the healthcare industry’s membership organization exclusively focused on providing leadership for the optimal use of healthcare information technology and management systems for the betterment of human health. Founded in 1961 with offices in Chicago, Washington D.C., and other locations across the country, HIMSS represents approximately 17,000 individual members and some 275 member corporations that employ more than 1 million people. HIMSS frames and leads healthcare public policy and industry practices through its advocacy, educational and professional development initiatives designed to promote information and management systems’ contributions to ensuring quality patient care.

HITSP
The Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel serves as a cooperative partnership between the public and private sectors for achieving a widely accepted and useful set of standards specifically to enable and support widespread interoperability among healthcare software applications, as they will interact in a local, regional, and national health information network for the United States. Comprised of a wide range of stakeholders, the Panel will assist in the development of the U.S. Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) by addressing issues such as privacy and security within a shared healthcare information system. The Panel is sponsored by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) in cooperation with strategic partners such as the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), the Advanced Technology Institute (ATI), and Booz Allen Hamilton. Funding for the Panel is being provided via the ONCHIT contract award from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

HL7
Health Level Seven is an American National Standards Institute (ANSI)-accredited Standards Developing Organization (SDO) operating in the healthcare clinical and administrative data arena. It is a not-for-profit volunteer organization made up of providers, vendors, payers, consultants, government groups, and others who develop clinical and administrative data standards for healthcare. Health Level Seven develops specifications; the most widely used being a messaging standard that enables disparate healthcare applications to exchange keys sets of clinical and administrative data.

MSHUG
Microsoft Healthcare Users Group (MS-HUG) unified with the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) as part of the HIMSS Users Group Alliance Program in October 2003. The unification strengthens the commitment of HIMSS and MS-HUG to better serve their members and the industry through a shared strategic vision to provide leadership and healthcare information technology solutions that improve the delivery of patient care.

WEDI
The Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange [WEDI’s] goal is to improve the quality of healthcare through effective and efficient information exchange and management. They aim to provide leadership and guidance to the healthcare industry on how to use and leverage the industry’s collective knowledge, expertise, and information resources to improve the quality, affordability, and availability of healthcare.

Assessment

As the health information technology industry evolves, we will continue to contribute our expertise to foster ideas that shape the future of healthcare by offering more examples similar to the above.

Conclusion

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Defining Health Level Seven [HL-7]

Posted on January 14, 2011 by Dr. David Edward Marcinko MBA MEd CMP™

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What it is – How it works?

By Dr. David Edward Marcinko MBA CMP™

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[Publisher-in-Chief]

HL7 is an international community of health care subject matter experts and information technology physicians and scientists collaborating to create standards for the exchange, management, and integration of protected electronic health care information. The Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Health Level Seven (HL7) standards developing organization has evolved Version 3 of its standard, which includes the Reference Information Model (RIM) and Data Type Specification (both ANSI standards).

HL7-3

The HL7 Version 3 is the only standard that specifically deals with creation of semantically interoperable health care information, essential to building the national infrastructure; HL7 promotes the use of standards within and among health care organizations to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of health care delivery for the benefit of all patients, payers, and third parties; uses an Open System Interconnection (OSI) and high level seven health care electronic communication protocol that is unique in the medical information management technology space and modeled after the International Standards Organization (ISO) and American National Standards Institute (ANSI); each has a particular health care domain such as pharmacy, medical devices, imaging, or insurance (claims processing) transactions. Health Level Seven’s domain is clinical and administrative data.

The Goals

Goals include:

  • develop coherent, extendible standards that permit structured, encoded health care information of the type required to support patient care, to be exchanged between computer applications while preserving meaning;
  • develop a formal methodology to support the creation of HL7 standards from the HL7 Reference Information Model (RIM);
  • educate the health care industry, policymakers, and the general public concerning the benefits of health care information standardization generally and HL7 standards specifically;
  • promote the use of HL7 standards world-wide through the creation of HL7 International Affiliate organizations, which participate in developing HL7 standards and which localize HL7 standards as required;
  • stimulate, encourage, and facilitate domain experts from health care industry stakeholder organizations to participate in HL7 to develop health care information standards in their area of expertise;
  • collaborate with other standards development organizations and national and international sanctioning bodies (e.g., ANSI and ISO) in both the health care and information infrastructure domains to promote the use of supportive and compatible standards; and
    • collaborate with health care information technology users to ensure that HL7 standards meet real-world requirements and that appropriate standards development efforts are initiated by HL7 to meet emergent requirements.

Assessment

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HL7 focuses on addressing immediate needs but the group dedicates its efforts to ensuring concurrence with other U.S. and International standards development activities. Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, India, Japan, Korea, Lithuania, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Southern Africa, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, and the United Kingdom are part of HL7 initiatives.

Conclusion

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Content Exchange and Vocabulary Standards for eMRs

Posted on October 14, 2010 by Dr. David Edward Marcinko MBA MEd CMP™

Understanding Terms and Definitions

By Shahid N. Shah MS

As per the HHS rules, vocabulary standards are standardized nomenclatures and e-code sets used to describe clinical problems and procedures, medications, and allergies for eMRs. Some commons terms and definitions are listed below:

Terms and Definitions

  • ASTM’s CCR – for most of your basic patient summary exchange needs the CCR will meet your needs. If you’re moving from low or no interoperability today to some interoperable capabilities then CCR is your best starting place.
  • International Classification of Diseases, 9th Revision, Clinical Modifications (ICD-9- CM) or SNOMED CT® should populate a problem list. If you’re not familiar with both standards and are unsure where to start, go with ICD-9 for problem lists. SNOMED is not commonly supported in the broad EMR industry but ICD-9 support is quite common so start there.
  • Health Level Seven (HL7) Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) Release 2 (R2) Level 2 CCD – for more advanced patient summary exchange needs the HL7 CDA is recommended. If you’re already supporting CCR exchange and it’s not meeting your needs then HL7 CDA is the next logical place to go.
  • For patient summary exchanges, HHS expect the following fields to be populated: problem list; medication list; medication allergy list; procedures; vital signs; units of measure; lab orders and results; and, where appropriate, discharge summary.
  • ICD-9-CM [ACD-10] or American Medical Association (AMA) Current Procedural Terminology (CPT®) Fourth Edition (CPT–4) to populate information related to procedures. Both of these standards are support broadly by most existing vendors so going with either or both is good.
  • For medication lists, HHS requires the use of codes from a drug vocabulary the National Library of Medicine has identified as an RxNorm drug data source provider with a complete data set integrated within RxNorm.
  • For lab results, HHS requires the use of LOINC® to populate information in a patient summary record related to lab orders and results when LOINC® codes have been received from a laboratory and are retained and subsequently available in your EMR. HHS states that in instances where LOINC® codes have not been received from a laboratory, the use of any local or proprietary code is permitted. HHS does not require these local or proprietary codes to be converted to LOINC® codes in order to populate a patient summary record.
  • For the purposes of electronic prescribing, your vendor must be capable of using NCPDP SCRIPT 8.1 or NCPDP SCRIPT 8.1 and 10.6. With respect to a vocabulary standard, your vendor must use codes from a drug vocabulary currently integrated into the NLM’s RxNorm. For the purposes of performing a drug formulary check, your vendor must be capable of using NCPDP Formulary & Benefits Standard 1.0 adopted by HHS (73 FR 18918).
  • There are standards required for insurance data like eligibility checking and submissions of claims. ASC X12N and NCPDP standards (Versions 4010/4010A and 5010 and Versions 5.1 and D.0, respectively) should be used for these transactions. It’s important to realize that Version 4010 is being phased out in favor of Version 5010 so your vendors need to support both at this time and must be able to move exclusively to Version 5010 in the future.
  • For the purposes of electronically submitting calculated quality measures required by CMS or by States, your vendor must be capable of using the CMS PQRI 2008 Registry XML Specification. Going forward, HL7 Quality Reporting Document Architecture (QRDA) Implementation Guide based on HL7 CDA Release 2 may be allowed but for now focus on the CMS PQRI requirements until HHS provides more guidance in the future.
  • For the purposes of submitting lab results to public health agencies, your vendor must be capable of using HL7 2.5.1.
  • For the purposes of electronically submitting information to public health agencies for surveillance and reporting, your vendor must be capable of using HL7 2.3.1 or HL7 2.5.1 as a content exchange standard. At this time HHS not required adverse event reporting nor have they adopted a specific vocabulary standard for submitting information to public health agencies for surveillance and reporting.
  • For the purposes of electronically submitting information to immunization registries your vendor must be capable of using HL7 2.3.1 or HL7 2.5.1 as a content exchange standard and the CDC maintained HL7 standard code set CVX -Vaccines Administered18 as the vocabulary standard.

Assessment

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Conclusion

And so, your thoughts and comments on this ME-P are appreciated. Feel free to review our top-left column, and top-right sidebar materials, links, URLs and related websites, too. Then, subscribe to the ME-P. It is fast, free and secure.  

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