Pediatric Informatics: Computer Applications in Child Health (Health ...

14 Supporting Continuing Pediatric Education and Assessment 201
educational and assessment activities, to define what activities are acceptable and
eligible to fulfill MOC requirements for pediatricians. Once a process to establish
this eligibility was in place, there was a need for a standard method by which activity
completion could be communicated between the two organizations.
14.3.2 Case Study: Developing Data Links Between
Two Pediatric Organizations
14.3.2.1 Problem
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the American Board of Pediatrics
(ABP) needed to create a standard by which electronic data about activities completed
by AAP members could be transmitted to the ABP for use in MOC. The
AAP and ABP use different computer platforms, languages and databases and
therefore needed a common denominator to encode and share this data.
14.3.2.2 Requirements
In addition to being able to enable data sharing between the ABP and AAP, the
ABP had an additional requirement for the standard to be flexible enough to handle
data from any other organization that provided activities that met MOC criteria.
Data fields for educational activities that needed to be shared with ABP include:
sponsoring organization information, activity name, start and end dates of the
activity, completion status, number of credits earned for the activity as well as data
for the participant. In addition, ABP and AAP shared many members, requiring a
matching process between the two organizations.
14.3.2.3 Design and Implementation
To accomplish this task, the ABP and the AAP agreed to use the MedBiquitous
Healthcare Professional Profile that allowed matching of ABP diplomates with
AAP members. The two organizations decided jointly what data points would be
required to match physician identities across databases. A combination of fields,
including Social Security Number, date of birth, first name, middle name, last name
and address were used to perform an initial match, yielding 85% exact identification
on all fields, with most of the rest successfully matched. The few that did not
match may have been boarded pediatricians who were never members of the AAP.
Once identities were matched, the MedBiquitous Activity Report was (developed
and) used to transfer data on specific activities between the two organizations.
The two organizations employed a Web Services model to implement this
transfer, in which each was able to export data in a format (eXtensible Markup