Guiding THE DEVELOPMENT OF HEALTH INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY STANDARDS FOR HIM PRACTICES.

Interoperability of health information systems will enable clinicians to communicate with their patients and each other using information and communication technology to enable safer, effective, and efficient care, and improve population health. Health information technology (HIT) standards are the key to interoperability. The American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) has been leading the process to guide the development of HIT standards to support health information management (HIM) practices. Since September 2014, AHIMA has actively worked with Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE)—an international collaborative of health professional associations and HIT vendors formed in 1998 to develop interoperability standards (specifications such as technical frameworks, integration profiles, and content profiles) for health information systems. By implementing IHE interoperability specifications, information systems realize efficient data capture, management, exchange, and use. The health information becomes standardized, and as a result enables effective and trusted use of information by clinicians, patients, and other stakeholders. Implementation of IHE standards has been successfully demonstrated since 2006 at the Interoperability Showcases of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society's (HIMSS) annual conferences. IHE methodology includes: 1. The analysis of business requirements for a specific clinical scenario (use case) 2. Selection of HIT standards developed by various standards development organizations (SDOs) relevant to the use case 3. Assembly (constraint) of these individual standards in the IHE interoperability specifications 4. Testing these specifications at the IHE Connectathons—the annual HIT industry­based interoperability standards testing forums held in North America, Europe, and Asia The IHE business model is based on engaging healthcare stakeholders (users) with the standard development process by guiding HIT vendors to develop, test, and implement standards­based HIT solutions—thus ensuring that quality health information is available when needed. IHE methodology was approved as the international standard by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Technical Committee 215 Health Informatics. Recognizing the urgent need for interoperability (i.e., information sharing) between health information systems, including electronic health record systems (EHRs), laboratory information management systems (LIMs), and other information and communication technology products in healthcare and public health organizations, AHIMA joined the IHE collaborative process to guide standardization of HIT products capabilities in order to support HIM practices. Since September 2014, AHIMA and IHE have collaborated on developing the white paper " HIT Standards for HIM Practices. " This white paper was developed as a part of a globally focused AHIMA initiative on information governance (IG), defined as an organization­wide framework for managing information throughout …