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

422 S.T. Rosenbloom and J. Kuhl
employ different methods for creating, drafting, and publishing standards; however
they generally include steps in which standards are iteratively revised, consensus is
generated and approval is sought from widening circles of experts.
32.4 Aligning and Certifying Standards
With multiple independent SDOs representing different stakeholders, there is the
need to align their published standards. Standards are only useful if they are universally
adopted and represent a broad range of needs. The Alliance for Pediatric
Quality (Alliance) is a collaboration of four major national pediatric organizations
formed to help align the pediatric community and bridge data standards initiatives,
including the work being done by the AAP Council on Clinical Information
Technology (COCIT) and the HL7 PeDSSIG. Alliance organizations include the
American Academy of Pediatrics, The American Board of Pediatrics, Child Health
Corporation of America and the National Association of Children’s Hospitals and
Related Institutions. The Alliance participates in national functional, messaging,
and terminology health care data standards initiatives to ensure that they address
pediatric issues, with ultimate goals of building consensus on child health care
data standards and influencing adoption of these standards. Consensus-building
to-date has involved the HL7 PeDSSIG and the AAP COCIT. The PeDSSIG is
an active volunteer group consisting of primarily child health practitioners, chief
medical information officers and informaticists. PeDSSIG participants work
together to identify and to agree upon data standards important for child health
care. The PeDSSIG works to ensure that the published HL7 standards include
those most important in providing general child health care. COCIT is a volunteer
organization made up of AAP members who have an interest in the application
of information technology to clinical pediatrics. COCIT educates AAP members
on health information technology, contributes to the development of AAP policy on
health information technology, and provides guidance to pediatricians seeking to
make decisions about the selection and use of clinical information technology in
practice. In early 2007, the Alliance led an effort to combine the functional criteria
identified by the PeDSSIG and COCIT into one master document that will be used
to identify gaps in the HL7 standards and the Certification Commission on Health
Information Technology (CCHIT) certification criteria.
Once standards have been developed, published, aligned, and accepted in the
greater community, objective certification organizations can then evaluate existing
products to determine whether they comply with the standards. Certification
helps consumers judge whether a given product has adopted and incorporated
published standards. For example, CCHIT is an independent private-sector commission
that tests commercial EHR systems using an agreed-upon set of functional
standards, and that certifies those systems that comply. As with SDOs, certification
organizations develop certification criteria through iterative cycles of proposal,