NEHTA Clinical Documents: The importance of the FAQs
Aug 24, 2012The NEHTA Clinical Document Specifications are available at the Software Developers Resource Centre (Note that these are registration protected, because you have to make certain legal agreements before you can use the documents, and also so that you can be notified of any changes). But anyone can register, and get access to these documents. The core CDA implementation Guides - the specifications that describe the actual document that is exchanged or persisted in the pcEHR, and the things they depend on, were all published on March 14. Changing these implementation guides is not currently possible, a policy decision made in order to create a stable base for implementation. That’s both good - you do need a stable base - and bad: what do you do if the specifications are unclear or ambiguous, or - more importantly, how to implement them correctly is unclear or ambiguous?
In practice, we’ve managed this by releasing “FAQs” - answers to common implementation questions. These FAQs have generally been released on the vendor partner site at http://www.nehta.gov.au/vendors. This is a password protected site, and the password is not available by registration. If you are implementing the NEHTA clinical documents, and you don’t have this password from a different source, contact me. Hopefully the FAQs will be moved to a public location very soon.
The FAQs are important. **Anyone implementing NEHTA CDA documents should read all of them, and get on the update notification list for them. **
Even the vendors that have access to them - and that are notified of updates to them - aren’t paying sufficient attention to them. Given that the specifications are frozen, the FAQs become more important - some of them offer important interpretations of how to use the specification. If you take the attitude that you’re not going to read them until you know that you need to… you’ll miss important stuff. I’m not sure what we can do to make people more aware of them (this blog post is part of an effort to raise their profile).
Here’s the current list (as of 24-Aug 2012) of CDA related FAQs:
- Representing Coding in CDA Documents
- How to represent MRNs in CDA documents?
- OIDs in HL7 CDA documents(Mostly a repeat ofthis blog post)
- Problem/Diagnosis Resolution Flag when there’s no date of resolution
- Which required IG Fields are allowed to have nullFlavors?
- Proper Use of “None Known” in Global Exclusion Statements
- Release Notes on Patient Medicines Change Type Code Values
- Clarification of Medical History in Specialist Letter
- Proper Representation of Pathology Test Result Date / Time
- Speciality in e-Discharge Summary
Note there will be of these in the coming days/weeks