A group of 100 health IT professions from government, medical groups and academia hope to create an umbrella organization focused on standardizing health data definitions, according to the Politico Morning eHealth newsletter.
The group meeting, which took place at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., July 13, was organized by HL7, a nonprofit that develops health IT standards, and the Healthcare Services Platform Consortium.
The umbrella group plan to define common data elements to be shared across healthcare, including clinical and research sectors. This standardization is a necessity for interoperability, according to the participants.
"We're not trying to create a huge new organization. We want to be able to say, 'here's a formal way to describe the data tools you're using,'" explained Stan Huff, MD, chief medical informatics officer at Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Healthcare, according to Politico Morning eHealth.
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