The goal of this project is to demonstrate a flexible, adaptive means of communicating healthcare information in a form that is suitable for exchange between health care organizations and patients for clinical, research, and evidence-based medical practice, as envisioned by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST [PCAST2010] ). In 2010, PCAST issued a report entitled “Realizing the Full Potential of Health Information Technology to Improve Healthcare for Americans: The Path Forward” calling for a universal exchange language to improve the quality of healthcare and reduce its cost:
"The best way to give clinicians a unified, patientcentric record tailored for each medical encounter is to store, maintain, update, and exchange the data as small, distributed, metadatatagged elements"
The report is cautious about relying on a single "standard data model"
"We believe that any attempt to create a national health IT ecosystem based on standardized record formats is doomed to failure."
It recommends a language that promotes distributed definition of expression ("a universal exchange language whose semantics is intrinsically extensible") so that the government and others can
"unburden itself of a potentially never ending and intrusive government role in the harmonization of health record meanings across all private sector products."
On one hand, this call for a metadata-based model is a fundamentally new vision of how we handle health information. On the other hand, it is a confirmation of the approach that has been used successfully for decades in both the VA VistA and the DoD CHCS systems, in the form of a metadata-driven data dictionary system.
For more information about the project and the current environment, see the following links:
For more information, please contact: