ONC Gets Vocabulary Recommendations

The HIT Standards Committee, an advisory body to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, has sent two recommendations to ONC covering the relationship of medical vocabularies to meaningful use of electronic health records.

The first recommendation calls for a single federal office or agency to be responsible for ensuring the creation, maintenance, dissemination and accessibility of all vocabulary value sets and subsets related to meaningful use. The entity would coordinate with standards development organizations, federal agencies and other relevant stakeholders.

The second recommendation calls for establishing an "authoritative infrastructure" for development, maintenance and dissemination of standard value sets and subsets related to meaningful use. The goal is one-stop shopping for meaningful use vocabularies.

The committee adopted the recommendations during its April 28 meeting. More information is available at http://healthit.hhs.gov. Click on Federal Advisory Committees.

--Joseph Goedert