FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Silver Spring, MD - In recent weeks the American Nurses Association (ANA) has received a number of inquiries that indicate a need to clarify news released in January 2007 by the Health Information Technology Standard Panel (HITSP). The HITSP has recommended that the ANA recognized terminology, the Clinical Care Classification (CCC), "may be applicable for documenting, coding, and tracking nursing care in any healthcare setting." The recommendation is based on the application of the CCC by the Biosurveillance Technical Committee (BIO TC) to a biosurveillance interoperability usecase. This recommendation is positive for the profession because it indicates the importance of nursing terminologies in the national interoperability work being conducted by HITSP. The recommendation, however, does not in any way preclude the use of other ANA recognized terminologies in electronic clinical information systems. In fact the ANA strongly encourages developers of ANA Recognized Nursing Terminologies (www.nursingworld.org/npii/terminologies.htm) and related experts to work with the HITSP BIO TC challenge in addressing the gaps in methods for standardizing nursing care information for biosurveillance and other secondary uses in the long term semantic interoperability efforts. Significant federal initiatives and funding support over the past several years have focused on expediting the transition from paper-based to electronic health records and personal health records that promote easy, interoperable, but secure, health data and information exchange and sharing. Changes of such a magnitude must involve discussions and decision-making, standards development, implementation, and evaluation efforts at the federal, regional, state, and local levels. Consequently increasing numbers of products, quality initiatives, and business practice changes are now emerging and affecting the healthcare industry. Registered nurses provide key insights with their capacity to identify problems and provide recommendations from the patient, provider, and organization perspectives. For example, the recent decision by Secretary Michael O. Leavitt, Department of Health and Human Services, to accept the thirty consensus standards recommended by the Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP) Interoperability Specification for Electronic Health Records, Biosurveillance, and Consumer Empowerment demonstrates how the consistent and persistent presence of registered nurses finally assured inclusion of language that addresses the use of standardized terminologies, such as the Clinical Care Classification system, to fully describe the observations, diagnoses, plans of care, interventions, and outcomes associated with patient care. Other ANA recognized nursing terminologies can be similarly referenced in this and other standards efforts if sufficient numbers of registered nurse stakeholders engage in the electronic health record, personal health record, and standards development processes and respond to the calls for public comment. The following initiatives represent a small sample of the diverse opportunities for well informed registered nurses with applicable expertise to support the inclusion of ANA recognized nursing content and terminologies in emerging informatics standards: American Health Information Community (AHIC) www.hhs.gov/healthit/community/background/ American National Standards Institute www.ansi.org ASTM E31 Healthcare Informatics www.astm.org/cgi-bin/SoftCart.exe/COMMIT/COMMITTEE/E31.htm?E+mystore Health Level 7www.hl7.org/ Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel www.ansi.org/standards_activities/standards_boards_panels/hisb/hitsp.aspx?menuid=3 Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes (LOINC®) www.regenstrief.org/medinformatics/loinc/ National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics www.ncvhs.hhs.gov/ Regional Health Information Organization (RHIO) www.himss.org/ASP/topics_rhio.asp SNOMED International www.snomed.org/index.html # # # # # #
March 26, 2007
CONTACT:
Mary McNamara, 301-628-5198
Mary Stewart, 301-628-5038
American Nurses Association Clarification Of Recent HITSP News And Call For Increased Participation By Registered Nurses In Developing Safe And Secure Information Systems
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