Transcript Federal Health IT Ontology Project (HITOP) Group

Federal Health IT Ontology
Project (HITOP) Group
The Vision Toward Testing
Ontology Tools in High Priority
Health IT Applications
October 5, 2005
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Overview
Vision Toward Testing Ontology Software with High
Priority Health IT Applications
ONCHIT Focus:
 NHIN
 Standards & Interoperability
 RHIOs
 Adoption of EHRs
HITOP Group
 Purpose
 Supporting Actions
 Four Major Goals
 Strategy for Health IT Project Collaboration
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ONCHIT Major Focus

Nationwide Health Information Network
(NHIN):
Work towards a nationwide interoperability
that allows secure and seamless health
information exchange. Work on
harmonizing standards for interoperability
and health information exchange.
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ONCHIT Major Focus, cont.

Standards and Interoperability
Achieving the vision of a national health information
infrastructure first requires interoperability to link
previously disparate health care information
systems. People often confuse interoperability
with standards, even though they are different.
Standards are much narrower and specify
technical details. Interoperability, on the other
hand, is a much broader concept that involves
both a technical and business context. In the
effort to establish this national health information
infrastructure, precise interoperability standards
for practice must be specified.
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ONCHIT Major Focus, cont

Regional Health Information Organizations
(RHIOs)
Regional Health Information Organizations or RHIOs
support state and other regional projects that
help harmonize the privacy and business rules for
health information exchange. There are over 100
regional projects under way that are funded by
the Federal government. Several other projects
are being supported by private industry efforts or
are substantiated by State Governors and/or
state legislation.
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ONCHIT Major Focus, cont

Adoption of EHRs
Drive Adoption of Electronic Health Records or EHRs
requires reducing the loss and risk physicians
face when investing in EHRs. This risk be reduced
by ensuring EHR products comply with minimal
standards for functionality, security and
interoperability; and helping provide
implementation support to doctors so they can
re-engineer their business processes with IT.
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HITOP Group Purpose

HITOP will survey existing best
practices and actions in the semantic
interoperability and ontology
communities of practice, identify
leading–edge innovations in the use
of ontology software tools for health
IT applications, and advance
interoperability and standards
supporting the NHIN.
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Ontology Actions Supporting Health IT
Project Development

The Ontology and Taxonomy Coordinating
Work Group (ONTCWG) will provide a
mechanism for voluntary coordination of
all activities within the Federal
government and other interested parties,
in developing Knowledge Classification and
Representation systems such as ontology,
taxonomies, thesauri and graphical
knowledge representations.
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Ontology Actions Supporting Health IT
Project Development, cont.

The National Center for Ontological
Research will hold its inaugural event
at the University of Buffalo, Oct. 27,
2005 – presenting a important
opportunity to form a roadmap
toward testing ontology tools in highpriority health IT applications.
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Ontology Actions Supporting Health IT
Project Development, cont.

AHRQ is funding $4 million with the FDA
and $ 1.15 million with the NLM to move
critical drug safety information from the
drug manufacturers to FDA, using an HL7
standard format and content, for FDA
approval. Once approved,, the information
will be posted publicly on the DailyMEd
web site. This project will continually
improve the standardization of drug
vocabulary and lead to improved patient
safety and quality of care.
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Ontology Actions Supporting Health IT
Project Development, cont.

AHRQ is funding NLM with $2.4
million to undertake mapping of ICD9 diagnostic codes and CPT-4
procedure codes to SNOMED, to
undertake a compilation of HL7
standards’ terminologies and
incorporate them into NLM’s
Metathesaurus.
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Ontology Actions Supporting Health IT
Project Development, cont.


AHRQ is funding CMS with $300,000 to
build and maintain a meta-data registry of
terms in the CHI standards that have been
adopted by HHS, VA and DoD.
AHRQ is funding NIST with $300,000 to
build and populate a web-based
Landscape that shows who is doing what
in health data standards in the U.S.
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Ontology Actions Supporting Health IT
Project Development, cont.



NIST points out, that for a long-term robust
solutions, ontology tools will need to be able to
classify standards and describe how standards
are related to each other.
Understanding semantics will be essential to a
long-term solution for interoperability.
NIST has proposals for a major interoperability
test bed for health care ontology, sharing
ontology tools, aligning different technologies,
comparing ontology tools for overlap and
dovetails.
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Ontology Actions Supporting Health IT
Project Development, cont.

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
FHA interoperability Working Group
is identifying sets of data standards
to promote interoperability.
Further work needs to be done to
address mapping and CHI regarding
implementation and relationships
between standards.
Therefore, mapping of government
furnished information is important.
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Four Major Goals
for the HITOP Group
1.
2.
3.
4.
Develop a Statement of Mission for HITOP
Communicate collective knowledge supporting
usage of ontology tools in health IT
applications.
Coordinate a meeting, to broadcast to the
broader audience, plans to develop test projects
for the use of ontology tools in health IT
applications.
Develop a roadmap on the state-of-the-art use
of ontology tools to achieve semantic
interoperability for high priority health IT
applications involving clinical decision support
systems (DSS) and electronic health records (EHRs).
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Four Step Strategy for Identifying High Priority
Health IT Projects for Collaboration with Ontology
Software Tools
1.
2.
3.
4.
Present a description of the goals for using
ontology tools in HIT applications to the
National Center for Ontological Research
(NCOR), Oct. 27th - HITOP Roadmap
Pick-up from the major eGov CHI vocabulary
work.
Connect CHI SMEs with NCOR SMEs
Coordinate public-private partnerships for
recommending, planning and developing
projects – testing the use of ontology software
tools in high priority health IT applications.
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