The Standard

Health Level Seven® (HL7®) International recently announced the appointment of three new members to the HL7 board of directors to serve a two-year term: Lori Evans Bernstein, MPH, co-founder and president, HealthReveal; Karen DeSalvo, M.D., MPH, chief health officer, Google Health; and Carolyn Petersen, MS, MBI, FAMIA, senior editor, Mayo Clinic.

“These leaders represent a broad spectrum of global stakeholders who are committed to advancing health through information technology. We are delighted to welcome them to the HL7 board of directors,” said Charles Jaffe, M.D., Ph.D., CEO of HL7. “Their strategic expertise and diverse experience will contribute greatly to HL7’s goal of improving the quality of care and reducing costs by overcoming the barriers to interoperability.”

Social Determinants of Health Data Matter for National COVID-19 Response Efforts

The Gravity Project is pleased to announce the publication of its consensus recommendations for food insecurity, housing instability and homelessness data elements. The Gravity Project is a national cross sector grassroots informed collective charged with building consensus data elements and data standards for the capture, exchange, and use of social determinants of health (SDOH) information. The Gravity food insecurity and housing data elements are the result of a year of development with input from its over 1,000 participants with intentional representation from key stakeholders such as patients, providers, community based organizations, payors, technology vendors, and federal and academic food insecurity and housing subject matter experts.

Social determinants of health—the circumstances in which we are born, grow, live, work and age—are estimated to account for 80-90% of health. There is growing interest from the healthcare sector to integrate social risk evaluation and intervention to advance the triple aim: improved health outcomes and quality of care while containing costs. In 2018, Gravity founders University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Social Interventions Research and Evaluation Network (SIREN) conducted an assessment of existing SDOH data and found much work was needed to advance the documentation and use of this data. Enter, the Gravity Project. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), a Gravity Project sponsor, noted the growing recognition across healthcare that by capturing and accessing SDOH data during the course of care, providers can more easily address non-clinical factors, such as food, housing and transportation insecurities, which can have a profound impact on a person’s overall health.

HL7 collaborates with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE), and the Association of Public Health Laboratories (APHL) to support eCR Now through the use of HL7 FHIR in the nationwide initiative formulated for the rapid roll-out of automated electronic case reporting (eCR) from EHRs to state and local public health agencies.

HL7 is developing the SANER HL7® Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) Implementation Guide (IG) to support standards-based communication to emergency response authorities regarding critical COVID-19 resources such as ICU beds, ventilators and other essential equipment and treatment supplies. Audacious Inquiry is leading the development of open source solutions that will follow the SANER HL7® FHIR® IG.

WASHINGTON – Today a group of technology leaders from Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and Salesforce came together at the CMS Blue Button 2.0 Developer Conference to reaffirm a commitment to interoperability made one year ago, and to share progress and plans to move decisively forward on this pledge.

Q&A With Bryn Lewis, PhD

First Place Winner of the HL7 C-CDA® Rendering Tool Challenge

On Tuesday, September 12, HL7 announced the winners of the HL7 Consolidated Clinical Document Architecture (C-CDA®) Rendering Tool Challenge. 

Bryn Lewis, PhD, a principal software development consultant at Intelsoft in Melbourne, Australia, developed the award-winning tool, Intelsoft C-CDA Viewer. Dr. Lewis's tool is an easy-to-use viewer of complex C-CDA documents available in any web browser.

C-CDA® Rendering Tool Challenge Background

Many clinicians are frustrated with the usability of C-CDA documents. Currently, an overabundance of data is rendered and sent to providers, requiring them to spend time sorting through data that is not relevant to their immediate needs.

HL7 and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) addressed this need by issuing a tool challenge to develop a viewer to enable clinicians to select the C-CDA document data most clinically relevant to them and display such data in an order they prefer.

The tool was required to meet the following criteria:

• Render the data as specified by the clinician thereby allowing him/her to quickly review the current health and needs of the patient
• Present requested data quickly and clearly through section-based view preferences (ordering), filter functions, intelligent sorting or some other functionality

Dr. Lewis was kind enough to share answers to the following questions ...