Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Health Level Seven (HL7) says it will participate in the new SDO (standards development organization) Charter Organization (SCO), whose purpose is to increase coordination and collaboration on healthcare informatics standards development.
The SCO aims to facilitate the resolution of the healthcare industry’s standards challenges for efficient information management and electronic data exchange by doing the following:
- Increasing coordination among SDOs through common strategies (e.g., models, vocabularies, data elements, syntax, etc.) and coordinated organizational communications;
- Improving consistency across standards to reduce implementation challenges;
- Enhancing standards usability and quality in the name of meaningful healthcare outcomes improvement; and
- Ensuring the availability of standards that support workflows and operations through enhanced interoperability now and in the future.
In addition to employing a common approach consistent with ANSI-accredited procedures in standards development to achieve interoperability across the healthcare user community, the SCO is also undertaking initial projects that reflect its diverse membership. Planned projects cover areas such as medication history, common medication information, allergy information tags, and cataloging current services and functional gaps/overlaps.
