This past week the Sequoia Project released the final version of its Data Usability Implementation Guide – a resource developed to offer guidance on improving the utility and value of data received by end users within clinical workflows.

WHY IT MATTERS
A joint project created by more than 360 members of Sequoia's public Data Usability Workgroup, the document (PDF) focuses on six topic categories:

• data provenance and traceability of changes. 
• effective use of codes.
• reducing impact of duplicates.
• data integrity and trust.
• data tagging and searchability.
• effective use of narrative for data usability.

The guide – developed with help from more than 120 comments from various healthcare stakeholders – focuses on priority use cases that can be adopted within health information exchange vendors, implementers, networks, governance frameworks and testing programs.

"This much-needed implementation guide delivers real-world data usability recommendations for health information networks and communities to enhance the usability of the health data shared by and between providers, public health, patients and others," said Mariann Yeager, CEO of the Sequoia Project.

THE LARGER TREND
The Data Usability Workgroup was launched in October 2020 to help advance the development of semantic interoperability. Its members were tasked with developing "specific and pragmatic implementation guidance on clinical content" for various stakeholders from the healthcare and interoperability industries. The goal was to produce an implementation guide that's comprehensive, inclusive and practical for healthcare communities and networks.

ON THE RECORD
"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," said Didi Davis, the Sequoia Project's vice president of informatics, conformance and interoperability.

Email the writer: mike.miliard@himssmedia.com
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS publication.