ONC Announces CDS Framework and Interoperability Initiative

June 6, 2012 by Gabriel Perna
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The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) is launching a new standards and interoperability framework, Health eDecisions. According to the ONC, the initiative, formerly known as CDS, will address standards for the ability to exchange clinical decision support interventions. It will operate as part of the ONC Standards & Interoperability Framework in conjunction with the Office of the Chief Medical Officer, which was also recently launched.

According to the ONC, there is a gap between what’s been done already with the standards and interoperability framework for CDS and the industry goal of producing updatable, findable, distributable, maintainable CDS interventions for use by EHR vendors, knowledge vendors, providers, and quality program leaders. The ONC says the creation of a standard format for sharable CDS will make for easier integration into EHR systems, and it will be more likely that such a sharable CDS structure is actually used by care providers.

“It is the intent of this new ONC effort to assemble input from leading technical contributors toward the establishment of a standard format for CDS interventions,” the ONC’s Jacob Reider and Alicia Morton, wrote in an email. The ONC is looking for volunteers to participate, registration can be found at: http://tinyurl.com/7mzhxmo. 

Comments

CDS Standards

Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 06/12/2012.

I think the ONC is on target...but a little late to the game. There is already a standard called "Open CDS". Several large organizations are already collaborating on this initiative. The industry can save a lot of time and money by getting behind this technical solution. It will require a wrapper of policies, rules of engagment, etc., but at least there is a technical solution.
Check out opencds.org

As an industry we should strongly consider getting behind a non-profit initiative that already has some momentum, rather than starting from scratch.

Jim Turnbull, CIO
University of Utah

Incorporating Open CDS into the Health eDecisions CDS Standard

Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 06/14/2012.

Jim,
ONC's S&I Framework will be reusing its open source collaboration model and the principles and practices of the Open Government directive (http://whitehouse.gov/open) to produce the national Health eDecisions CDS standard.

The balloted IG produced will incorporate and build on the existing Open CDS standard just like the Lab Results/Lab Orders/eDOS standard IGs are being built upon the existing HL7 2.5.1-balloted ELINCs Lab Results and Lab Orders IGs and the previous eDOS effort headed by the ACLA.

And, the process is already underway because David Shields from Open CDS is one of the 76 attendees of the kick-off Web conference today which is accessible to any interested party at: http://wiki.siframework.org/Health+eDecisions+Homepage .
Bob Coli, MD