A large area of interest within the healthcare information exchange arena is the ability to transmit information to various authorities, such as departments of health, or quality measure evaluators. With large players like the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), and the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), starting to embrace the emerging standards for interoperability, a solution’s ability to perform these types of data transfers is a critical success factor for such healthcare IT systems. Unfortunately, activities like public health reporting and biosurveillance are often controlled by many jurisdictions across the country, and have varying firm standards for implementation. This leads to variation in implementation, variation in presentation, variation in delivery—in short, a vendor’s nightmare that can quickly become your nightmare. This unfortunate circumstance is compounded by high-level specifications of standards from the Federal Government that affect data formats and representations, but does not address translations from legacy paradigms to the new ones, nor do these standards specify norms for presentation or appropriate reporting of information to authorities. You will need to make these determinations when selecting a healthcare IT solution to ensure you can continue any currently-required reporting, and be able to seamlessly bridge to the new wave of requirements for those activities. When evaluating a solution to enable critical reporting by your healthcare applications, you need to consider several litmus indicators before concluding that you can achieve your external reporting goal with it. The following table lists some of these important considerations.
When evaluating a healthcare IT solution, you need to consider several litmus indicators before concluding that your plans for upgrading your healthcare IT architecture and/or systems will not leave you exposed to unforeseen-but-preventable errors that disrupt operations and increase liability risk. The following table lists some of these important considerations.
|
Litmus Indicator |
Description |
| Dynamic Definition of Reporting Data-Sets |
With a new era dawning on healthcare quality reporting and public health reporting, we can expect a proliferation of new measures and tweaking of old measures to abound. Vendors then need to incorporate these custom requirements into their products, issue new product releases with that functionality, and upgrade their customers before the new reporting can even be done. New innovations enable an on-the-fly definition of data-sets for reporting, so healthcare IT systems can import them without needing an upgrade of the underlying software.. |
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Consistency and Correctness of Reports |
Typically, the definition of the measures or data sets for reporting are imprecise, and force individual interpretations by each organization on what is actually being sought for measurement. Further, if reporting is to be done by some electronic means through electronic health records and the like, the actual data reported may vary across vendor products, yielding inconsistency across enterprises doing the reporting, and possibly incorrectness of reports due to vendor misinterpretation. You will need to understand how this risk is mitigated using your healthcare IT solution. |
|
Transmission to Authorities |
Part of the challenge involved in reporting data is how to get it to the requesting party. Many manual processes have been set up for people to upload data to websites, transfer files to servers, and email data from place to place. The trends with electronic health records and other point-of-care tools is to directly transfer information to the requesting entity, or to an intermediary that will complete the delivery to the ultimate destination. Your healthcare IT solution should have a clear strategy on how it will deliver information to entities like CMS, CDC, the state department of health, or other important destinations, and it should leverage emerging standards, as well as be extensible to accommodate growing interest in automatic reporting. |
|
Visual-Presentation Flexibility |
Part of the challenge involved in reporting data is how to get it to the requesting party. Many manual processes have been set up for people to upload data to websites, transfer files to servers, and email data from place to place. The trends with electronic health records and other point-of-care tools is to directly transfer information to the requesting entity, or to an intermediary that will complete the delivery to the ultimate destination. Your healthcare IT solution should have a clear strategy on how it will deliver information to entities like CMS, CDC, the state department of health, or other important destinations, and it should leverage emerging standards, as well as be extensible to accommodate growing interest in automaticreporting. |
|
Aggregation of Reports from Multiple Sources |
Communities of different types (regional, statewide, disease-management, etc.)are now tying themselves together electronically and sharing information. This circumstance makes it natural to think about reporting based on comparative analysis, benchmarking, and combined analysis among networked organizations. Reporting at the aggregate level is tricky since the individual sources may not handle the same kind of reporting identically. Your healthcare IT solution should work well within this emerging paradigm. |
GSI Health Can Help You! GSI Health has extensive experience in testing healthcare IT systems, and focuses on data-driven testing for understandable and thorough test batteries. Our consultants can assist you in navigating the issues discussed in this paper, and provide the professional IV&V services you need to properly test your healthcare IT applications and architecture. Our testing methods account for adherence to national standards, and are extensible to accommodate local requirements. To learn more about how GSI Health can help make you successful in deploying a strong quality assurance program as a part of your healthcare IT project, please contact us by phone at 1-888-206-4237 or email HITvision@gsihealth.com.