Registration is now open for our upcoming webinar "Health Data Standards for Care and Research" on Tuesday, July 20, from 12-1pm ET, featuring Clem McDonald, MD, Chief Health Data Standards Officer, Office of the Director, National Library of Medicine.
Register here.
In medical systems, data standards are the key to the interoperability kingdom. Without them, you can't combine a patient's data from many different sources, find all tests of one kind (e.g., SARS-CoV-2 NAAT tests), or easily convert values of a variable delivered from two different systems that use different units of measure (i.e., pounds or kilograms to measure body weight).
Two kinds of standards are especially important: 1) standards for data structures which define the data structured into records and what kind of slots exist in each record (think of these as data exchange formats, and 2) standards about the coding systems that go into these slots.
Medicare, for example, defines the structure for a billing record and the coding systems such as CPT, HCPCS, or ICD-10 that go into the slots of this structure.
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) has defined some of the structures required for the exchange of healthcare data (e.g. Health Level 7 [HL7], DICOM, etc.) and the code systems that populate one of the slots (e.g. RxNorm for drugs, SNOMED CT, ICD-10 for problems, and LOINC for laboratory and clinical observations). Recent regulations from ONC and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) that require these standards will go into effect in 2022.
Dr. McDonald will present an overview of major coding systems and data exchange formats used in healthcare, reflecting on his pioneering history in health data standards development, and what recent policy changes may mean for the future. He hopes to demystify what data standards are and how they can help to facilitate access and use by clinicians, patients, and researchers.
MedBiquitous Community Connection is a series of free one-hour webinars featuring health professions educators and technology innovators from around the globe. "MedBiquitous Community Connection" provides a forum for community experts to share how digital technologies are promoting improvement and better outcomes across the continuum of health professions education. A portion of each webinar will reserve time for a brief Q&A session, allowing attendees the opportunity to dialogue with guest speakers.