Meeting Minutes – Tuesday, October 10, 2017
FHA Attendees: Cait Ryan, Alberto, Llanes, Galen Mulrooney, Steve Wagner
Other Attendees: *
Welcome and Introductions 2:00 PM – 2:10 PM
- Cait welcomed the grouped, reviewed the agenda and explained that the attendees were on listen only mode until the Open Discussion.
- Cait provided the following overview for the Federal Health Architecture program:
- Established as an OMB e-gov LOB in 2005
- FHA was created to ensure the seamless and secure exchange of health information among its partners.
- FHA funding partners include Department of Defense-Defense Health Agency (DHA), HHS-OCIO, Social Security Administration (SSA), Veteran Affairs-Veteran Health Administration (VHA) and its managing partner The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT.
- FHA has lead initiatives in the following areas, CONNECT Gateway, Healthcare Directory, Direct, Enterprise Architecture, Federal Health Information Modeling and NIEM. (For a complete list of FHA lead initiatives see slide)
- It was explained that given the nature of clinical health IT, and conversations with several NIEM community participants, the health domain is unique from others in that, we struggle to recognize the business need to use NIEM given the many exchange standards (HL7v2; HL7 FHIR) and terminology standards 9SNOMED, LOINC, RxNorm, etc.) that the clinical health community is already engaged in.
- The FHA realizes there is a need from other domains to include health elements in their exchanges and they do not have access to those elements.
- FHA Goals for NIEM:
- Align the NIEM with clinical health standards by leveraging FHIM
- Formalize the relationship between the NIEM and Clinical Health Communities
- Alberto explained that there is a lot of overlap in clinical health standards, especially as terminology standards evolve which add to the complexity and making it near impossible for someone with no prior clinical health experience to know how to properly include health elements in their exchanges.
- FHA will provide initial guidance leveraging its FHIM and referencing authoritative sources so that these elements can be used in IEPDs.
- Galen explained the FHIM is a logical information model of health data developed in collaboration with the federal partner agencies designed to support the federal health enterprise.
- Standardizes and harmonizes content (information, terminologies and value sets) across federal partner and standards organizations based on their priorities (e.g., MU) and use cases
- Integrates with open source Model Driven Health Tools (MDHT) to automate the generation of health information exchange (HIE) standards (e.g., interoperability Specifications)
- The FHIM captures the breadth and depth of health terminology and incorporates these standards:
HL7v2, HL7 CDA (including CCD & C-CDA), HL7 FHIR, NCPDP Telecom, NCPDP Script, ASC X12
- Galen walked the group through the Person Package
- The group was invited to attend the following FHIM meetings(weekly)
- Terminology (Wednesdays)
- Information Modeling (Fridays)
- Please email Galen Mulrooney for more information.
Deep Dive into NIEM Alignment 2:40 PM – 2:45 PM
- Alberto outlined the steps FHA will take to publish preliminary guidance materials within the NIEM health community: (Please see slides for full details)
- High Level FHIM to NIEM Core Mapping/Guidance
- Identify most commonly needed health elements
- Leverage FHIM to access authoritative element value sets and code sets
- Provide high level and detailed guidance with examples on how to traverse from the NIEM Core to required FHIM elements and how elements can be associated at least conceptually if not through notation
Questions 2:45 PM – 2:55 PM
- Due to audio issues this session was ended early. Questions were generic to the presentation asking for updated slides, links to FHIM and to the NIEM Health Activities page
Action Items
- Update NIEM.github.io/health