New HL7 Workgroup Focuses on Quality

Standards development organization Health Level Seven International has formed a new clinical quality information workgroup to create standards to support health quality initiatives.

The issue of quality is foremost in much of the standards making work of existing HL7 workgroups, which focus on specific domains such as orders and observations, electronic health records or unstructured documents. But until now, there hasn’t been a workgroup with the sole focus of quality.

The new workgroup will create and maintain interoperability standards to support health quality improvement initiatives, and educate stakeholders on the importance and benefits of such standards.

Co-chairs of the clinical quality information work group include Floyd Eisenberg, M.D. of iParsimony; Patricia Craig of The Joint Commission; Crystal Kallem of Lantana Consulting Group; and Walter Suarez, M.D., of Kaiser Permanente. More information, including the first business meeting of the group held on January 15, is available here.