March 7, 2007

8:30 AM - 9:30 AM

Level: Intermediate

Managing health care information looms as one of the most important issues of the next decades. Scores of organizations have been gathering data on the state of Americans’ health, and the effort will accelerate as the baby boomers age and require more and more accurate tracking of their health and treatment status.

The United States Health Information Knowledgebase (USHIK) is one response to making sense of the plethora of diverse health care datasets. As a metadata registry for health care information, USHIK contains and links to the data elements and information models of Standards Development Organizations (SDO’s) and other health care organizations to facilitate the ease with which public and private organizations can harmonize information formats of health care standards. USHIK implements a metadata registry methodology based on ISO/IEC 11179, Information technology – Metadata Registries, and is sponsored by the Agency for Health Research Quality (AHRQ) and has been guided by the American National Standards Institute’s Health Informatics Standards Board.

With over twelve thousand data elements and related items, USHIK supports data sharing with cross-system and cross-organization descriptions of common units of health data. Since 2004, USHIK has been used to register selected Consolidated Health Informatics (CHI) standards under sponsorship of the Federal Health Architecture’s CHI Council. Most recently, the Biosurveillance Technical Committee of the Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP) utilized USHIK to perform comparisons among selected standards to document and support their decision-making process.

Among the capabilities of the USHIK are:

• Describing data using common characteristics. Promoting development of good data names and descriptions assists users of shared data to have a common understanding of a unit of data's meaning, representation, and identification. This insures the data quality of shared information.
• Providing multiple ways to locate data descriptions. Providing both standard and custom 'drill-down' methods to data descriptions allows users to recognize different points of view to narrow and focus on data definitions to be retrieved. The number of data definitions does not overwhelm the user.
• Allowing Web access to provide easy access and promote use of standards. Good data descriptions become standards. When these standards are re-used, interoperability between systems is easier, more efficient, and data quality improves.
  

Judith Newton is a Senior Analyst with AlfoTech Solutions. She is currently engaged in standards analysis and population of metadata registry implementations (USHIK and the Military Health Service Metadata Registry) for healthcare information.

She is a U.S. delegate to the International Standards Organization Subcommittee for Data Management and Interchange (ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 32), Working Group 2, Metadata, and author and editor of several Standards and Technical Reports. She is a member of ANSI INCITS L8, Metadata, which is U.S. TAG to SC 32/WG 2.

She is past president of the Data Administration Management Association (DAMA) National Capital Region Chapter (DAMA-NCR), has chaired DAMA-NCR Symposia, and serves on the Executive Board of DAMA-NCR. She is the Vice President for Standards of the DAMA Foundation.

From 1979 to 2004, she was employed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, where she led and participated in various standardization, research and consultancy projects.

She was the recipient of the 2005 DAMA-International Government Award.

Dr. Laura Reece has been a primary consultant in the development of the United States Health Information Knowledgebase (USHIK) and was instrumental  in population, management, and further development of its Australian predecessor, the National Health Information Knowledgebase (NHIK).  With support from the Military Health System (MHS) she was responsible for standing up and populating the Military Health Service (MHS) Metadata Registry (MHS MDR, and continues activities to further develop and utilize USHIK for national health standards harmonization and exchange, with the sponsorship of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid ( CMS) and the Agency for Health Research Quality (AHRQ). 

A past member of ANSI INCITS L8, Metadata, which is U.S. TAG to SC 32/WG 2. Dr. Reece has been both an Australian delegate and a U.S. delegate to the International Standards Organization Subcommittee for Data Management and Interchange (ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 32), Working Group 2, Metadata. 

Dr. Reece currently works for Northrop Grumman/TASC on issues of metadata harmonization, integration and registration for the GeoSpatial information community.  She also supports USHIK in activities of the Health Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP) national harmonization activities.