AMIA - Setting the Standard

Informatics professionals have a significant role to play in the development, maintenance, implementation, and evaluation of standards that are intended to advance both the science of informatics and the use of informatics techniques in practical applications. In this special JAMIA issue, the informatics community adds an informatics focus to one of the most critical problems in informatics and health IT – biomedical data standards. While the use of biomedical data standards is important for many reasons, none seem more timely than supporting interoperability across different health information technology applications. IEEE defines interoperability as the ability of two or more systems or elements to exchange information (syntactic interoperability) and to use the information (semantic interoperability) that has been exchanged.1 Biomedical standards are used to define both the syntax as well as the semantics of biomedical information and thus are a critical part of supporting interoperability. While the articles in this special issue all represent contributions to our understanding of biomedical data standards, there are several to highlight because they illustrate issues that are specific to interoperability and demonstrate ways in which the informatics community can support both biomedical data standards and interoperability. Standards that are built from smaller building blocks provide greater flexibility and can be extended in ways that support both interoperability and new kinds of information. We see this in Warner et al. ,2 as the authors extend the consolidated clinical document architecture to support a new oncology-specific document format. …

[1]  Mor Peleg,et al.  Solving the interoperability challenge of a distributed complex patient guidance system: a data integrator based on HL7's Virtual Medical Record standard , 2015, J. Am. Medical Informatics Assoc..

[2]  James Geller,et al.  Scalable quality assurance for large SNOMED CT hierarchies using subject-based subtaxonomies , 2015, J. Am. Medical Informatics Assoc..

[3]  Genevieve B. Melton,et al.  Assessing the adequacy of the HL7/LOINC Document Ontology Role axis , 2015, J. Am. Medical Informatics Assoc..

[4]  Jeremy L. Warner,et al.  Development, implementation, and initial evaluation of a foundational open interoperability standard for oncology treatment planning and summarization , 2015, J. Am. Medical Informatics Assoc..

[5]  Jung In Park,et al.  A national action plan for sharable and comparable nursing data to support practice and translational research for transforming health care , 2015, J. Am. Medical Informatics Assoc..

[6]  Martin Eisenacher,et al.  Development of data representation standards by the human proteome organization proteomics standards initiative , 2015, J. Am. Medical Informatics Assoc..

[7]  Dipak Kalra,et al.  Semantic enrichment of clinical models towards semantic interoperability. The heart failure summary use case , 2015, J. Am. Medical Informatics Assoc..

[8]  Peter J. Park,et al.  Standard for improving emergency information interoperability: the HL7 data elements for emergency department systems , 2015, J. Am. Medical Informatics Assoc..

[9]  Daniel J. Vreeman,et al.  Supporting interoperability of genetic data with LOINC , 2015, J. Am. Medical Informatics Assoc..

[10]  Christopher G. Chute,et al.  Transformation of standardized clinical models based on OWL technologies: from CEM to OpenEHR archetypes , 2015, J. Am. Medical Informatics Assoc..

[11]  Ann O'Brien,et al.  A nursing information model process for interoperability , 2015, J. Am. Medical Informatics Assoc..

[12]  Guilherme Del Fiol,et al.  Data standards to support health information exchange between poison control centers and emergency departments , 2015, J. Am. Medical Informatics Assoc..

[13]  Patricia C. Dykes,et al.  Harmonizing and extending standards from a domain-specific and bottom-up approach: an example from development through use in clinical applications , 2015, J. Am. Medical Informatics Assoc..