User Experience and Functionality
Strategy for how stakeholders and end-users engage with the SHIELD tooling and available knowledge.
Detailed Description
Although a comprehensive knowledge management system is necessary to support clinical interoperability, local users need to be able to access knowledge resources in a straightforward and user-friendly fashion. IVD vendors and terminology maintainers also need to be able to interact with and maintain resources easily and in a way that enforces consistent practices. Necessary features include:
Searchable websites of all knowledge resources (LIDR, UDIs, traceability)
Flat file or manual export of necessary information
Programmatic access to necessary information (i.e. APIs)
An implementation help portal for best practices
Authoring tools for modifications and additions to knowledge bases
An established workflow for producing, versioning, and maintaining knowledge bases
Vendor health IT system functionality for programmatic access to information
Supporting Tactics
Tactic | Impact |
|---|---|
LIDR/UDI Vendor Authoring Tool | Make it easy for vendors to assign codes quickly and well. |
LIDR Implementation Help Portal | Education resources for labs and hospitals implementing code mappings. Training for harmonization, workflow integration and data exchange. Includes auto-population tools for labs, reference implementation for testing messages and message validators. HL7 v2 and FHIR support. |
Tools for Automated lab catalog and data dictionary maintenance | Ideally laboratories/vendors would not need to manually look up necessary LIDR or semantic mappings--searching within the LIS via API calls to necessary repositories would ease burden |
Supporting Use Cases
Use Case |
|---|
A laboratory is adding a new test to its menu. By querying the LIDR, the laboratory is able to define appropriate terminology code mappings for its test, and they are also able to determine that the test is traceable to an international reference standard. |
A health information exchange (HIE) receives information from an EHR about laboratory tests. They receive information about the test, its code, and the device that performed it, but not the traceability information. They are able to query the central repository to access the missing traceability information. |
A laboratory wants to update its mapped encodings for laboratory tests so that they are accurate with the new recommendations. The LIS has no ability to query outside systems through an API. A technologist is able to go to the LIDR website, identify necessary tests, and download a .csv file containing all necessary mapping information, which then can be imported to the LIS. |
A laboratory wants to update its mapped encodings for laboratory tests so that they are accurate with the new recommendations. The LIS has the ability to query outside systems through an API. A technologist is able to directly search within the LIS for mapping information appropriate to that IVD. |
An IVD vendor creates a new IVD and wants to include new information in the LIDR. Using a freely available authoring tool, the vendor is able to generate mappings and necessary IDs according to a pre-specified manner. |
Key Initiatives & Action Items
Define necessary implementation help materials
Define necessary authoring tools
Define protocol for LIDR and semantic resource knowledge creation and maintenance
Define a strategy to ease and mitigate burden of manual access to knowledge resources (near term)
Define a strategy for programmatic access to knowledge resources (long term)