After incorporating industry and public feedback The Sequoia Project released the Data Usability Implementation Guide Version 2 created by its Interoperability Matters Data Usability Workgroup. 

WHY IT MATTERS

The nonprofit nationwide health IT interoperability organization's DUWG develops specific and pragmatic implementation guidance on clinical content for healthcare stakeholders to facilitate health information exchange.

The additions in its updated guide aim to advance data usability across HIE vendors, implementers, networks, governance frameworks and testing programs, according to Didi Davis, the Sequoia Project's vice president of informatics, conformance and interoperability and DUWG lead.

The revised resource spans seven topics, including:

• Data provenance and traceability of changes.
• Effective use of codes in shared information.
• Reducing impact of duplicates.
• Data integrity and trust.
• Data tagging and searchability.
• Effective use of narrative for usability.
• Laboratory data interoperability.

"After feedback from the industry, many key changes were made to this version of the Implementation Guide, including added guidance for receiving systems, advanced baseline 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 baseline requirements from USCDI V1 (problem, allergy, medications, immunizations only) to all data classes within USCDI V3.
• Expanded guidance to be technology agnostic with added requirements for HL7 FHIR, HL7 v2.x, and HL7 C-CDA across the topic categories.
• Added an atopic category for laboratory.

Dr. Adam Davis, physician informaticist at Sutter Health and DUWG cochair, added a lot of hard work and collaboration went into the revision.

The workgroup, which began working on the Implementation Guide Version 2.0 last year and released the draft revision in July, also launched a team to collect laboratory guidance from industry subject matter experts and incorporate that feedback into this final version. 

THE LARGER TREND

The DUWG launched in October 2020 to focus on data usability requirements for provider-to-provider, provider-to-public health agency and healthcare entity-to-consumer information exchanges.

The workgroup, with some 360 members, published its Implementation Guide 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 the workflow of a clinician and paves the way for accurate and reliable communication for the data exchanged to be more computable for clinical decision support and more actionable," Davis said upon the first release.

Through a collaboration with the American Health Information Management Association, the Sequoia Project is also providing technical assistance, testing support and facilitation to help make data exchanged among organizations more computable and actionable through a data usability initiative.

The Data Usability Taking Root initiative, which launched last year, focuses on improving the quality and actionability of health information received by end users within their workflows. Initial 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, 

ON THE RECORD

"We look forward to continuing to identify and solve barriers to improving data usability," Dr. William Gregg, vice president of clinical data and interoperability at HCA Healthcare and DUWG cochair, said in a statement.

Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.