IHE Patient Care Coordination (PCC) Face to Face Meeting Update

  

  

  Last week, Feb 10^th - 15^th, the IHE ITI, QRPH, and PCC committee meetings were in beautiful historic Vienna, Austria. One aspect of these meetings on international soil that really excites me is that they attract experts from different parts of the world that do not normally attend the meetings based in the US. This brings new ideas to light based on how other countries are working to solve their own healthcare IT related problems. While we certainly have differing healthcare systems, local policies and challenges among our respective countries we do share the common goal to improve patient care. The Patient Care Coordination(PCC) domain has one new profile, re-work to one existing profile, and one white paper on its plate this cycle.

  The new profile, Multiple Clinical Views (MCV) focuses on providing the capability of systems to appropriately render CDA documents to clinicians and patients based on any given clinical situation. It does so without altering the original CDA source of narratives and structured entries by utilizing tagging constructs in conjunction with XSL stylesheets. This meets a critical need in the market of being able to present data based on one’s perspective. For example, a clinician may need to see certain data, or data in a certain way to be able to most efficiently and effectively accomplish her goal, whereas a patient needs to see a different rendering of that same data, or perhaps more or less depending on the data section. The MCV profile will provide guidance on how to accomplish that, but will not enforce exactly what data should/should not or shall/shall not be shown as this would ultimately be determined by local policy and/or specific use cases within a medical discipline.

  The profile being reworked is Reconciliation of Diagnoses, Allergies, and Medications (RECON). The scope of this effort includes revisiting how reconciliation applies to more than just the elements included in the title of the current profile, namely care providers and care goals. We are also considering converting some of the requirements into named options so that adoption will increase. We know that systems are doing reconciliation today, but the approach the current RECON profile takes has potentially negatively affected implementation numbers. By structuring the requirements into a more modular approach systems will have an easier implementation path, and thus higher adoption levels will result. This will benefit not only US specific implementations that today must align with Meaningful Use but also many international HIT products that are working toward reconciliation of data as well.

The Data Access Framework (DAF) white paper is another exciting effort that is identifying the alignments and gaps between IHE profiles and the US Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) efforts around advancing interoperability through the Standards and Interoperability (S&I) Framework. This is an opportunity for IHE and the US federal government to collaborate to share ideas and work together to achieve the common goal of bettering patient care. This work could result in new IHE profile proposals in future cycles.

  Overall there is not a great deal of work on the plate of PCC for the 2014-2015 cycle. This is ok though as we also have several change proposals to work through this year which will help to solidify our specifications. The next IHE meeting for these domains is in May in Chicago. Stay tuned for an update from that meeting as well and be sure to check out my blog as well for more details of ongoing IHE work.