Healthcare Standards Landscape

The Health Care (HC) industry has many standards development organizations (SDOs) developing specifications and standards for healthcare informatics and information exchange covering a wide spectrum of HC activities. The many development efforts and large number of healthcare standards that exist or are in-development, make it very difficult to monitor and track the overall healthcare standards landscape. This in-turn impedes harmonization efforts among SDOs and frustrates efforts by users and organizations to identify understand and adopt needed standards. By improving the availability and dissemination of healthcare standards information many of these problems can be relieved and collaboration and implementation efforts can be improved among developers, implementers, and users of healthcare standards.

Healthcare standards development, adoption, and use can be improved by ensuring that developers and stakeholders (e.g. healthcare providers, payers, suppliers, integrators, vendors, users, etc) are aware of existing and ongoing healthcare standards' development and deployment efforts. The NIST Health Care Standards Landscape (HCSL or "Landscape") project is addressing this need by developing and demonstrating a Web-based repository of information on healthcare standards, organizations, and resources that can assist in standards development, coordination, implementation, adoption and use by developers and other stakeholders.

NIST is collaborating with HC standards developers and stakeholders to define, develop, test, and demonstrate the prototype HCSL capability. This includes working with the ANSI Health Information Tecnology Standards Panel (HITSP), the Agency for Health Research and Quality (AHRQ), and the e-Gov Consolidated Health Informatics (CHI) program, as well as actively monitoring and engaging other SDOs and HC organizations. The HCSL prototype is now available on the Web, using sample data to demonstrate its overall capabilities, and has been made available for external partners to test and evaluate, and to contribute additional HC standards? information to the HCSL. Subsequently, NIST will make the prototype HCSL software and data available for downloading and use by other organizations, and will collaborate in establishing a distributed HCSL capability on the Web that can be accessed and shared by users, developers, and stakeholders of HC standards? information.

Downloads

IHE Open Source Project: XDS software (html file)

Message Maker Prototype (html file)

Healthcare Standards Landscape (html file)

Healthcare Information Standards and Testing, A Concept Paper (pdf file)

Conformance Testing and Certification Framework, White Paper (pdf file)

What is This Thing Called Conformance, White Paper (html file)

Principles for Writing Conformance Criteria (pdf file)

Building HL7 EHR-S Conformance Criteria, Slide presentation (html file)