Utilizing Standard Data Transactions and Public-Private Partnerships to Support Healthy Weight Within the Community.

CONTEXT: Obesity is a significant health issue in the United States that both clinical and public health systems struggle to address. Electronic health record data could help support multi-sectoral interventions to address obesity. Standards have been identified and created to support the electronic exchange of weight-related data across many stakeholder groups. CASE DESCRIPTION: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention initiated a public-private partnership including government, industry, and academic technology partners to develop workflow scenarios and supporting systems to exchange weight-related data through standard transactions. This partnership tested the transmission of data using this newly-defined Healthy Weight (HW) profile at multiple health data interoperability demonstration events. FINDINGS: Five transaction types were tested by 12 partners who demonstrated how the standards and related systems support end-to-end workflows around managing weight-related issues in the community. The standard transactions were successfully tested at two Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) Connectathon events through 86 validated tests encompassing 38 multi-partner transactions. DISCUSSION: We have successfully demonstrated the transactions defined in the HW profile with a public-private partnership. These tested IT products and HW standards could be used to support a continuum of care around health related issues encompassing both health care and public health functions. CONCLUSION: The use of the HW profile, including a set of transactions and identified standards to implement those transactions, in IT products is a helpful first step in leveraging health information technology to address weight-related issues in the United States. Future work is needed to expand the use of these standards and to assess their use in real world settings.

A new model for collaboration: building CDA documents in MDHT.

Clinical Document Architecture implementation guides (IGs) specify a standard format for electronic submission and are typically developed by a few standards specialists working in national committees that do not have the resources to address the range of use cases needed for community-wide document-based health information exchange. To accommodate the variation inherent in these use cases we must be able to customize a base IG according to state and local rules, and to document ownership of these constrained guides. Model Driven Health Tools (MDHT) is an open source framework that enables community authoring. The Public Health Data Standards Consortium assembled a cross-disciplinary team to develop Public Health Case Report IGs for 15 reportable conditions using MDHT, with the goal of supporting state and local customization. This paper describes our experience learning MDHT and evaluates how well MDHT meets our objectives.