HL7 Technical Committee or
Special Interest Group
Mission and Charter Statement

Group Name: Clinical Decision Support Technical Committee

Mission

This group supports the HL7 mission to create and promote its standardsbyworking on issues related to single-patient-focused health care decision support messaging. The committee will focus on development of messages independent of any implementation of clinical logic. The TC will also be responsible for support and development of Arden Syntax for Medical Logic Systems as well as a standard for representation of clinical guidelines. These will serve as test cases in the development of general messaging schemes.

The role of this TC is to (a) identify the scope and range of data elements required for the functionality of decision support applications, (b) work with other SIGs, TCs, or outside organizations to identify appropriate controlled vocabulary for encoding those data elements, (c) identify or define messages (and objects) required to support the specific information exchange needs of decision support applications, both as feeders to decision support applications and as output from decision support applications.

Charter

Work Products and Contributions to HL7 Processes

Work will focus on patient-centered monitoring, alerts and reminders.

  • Finalize and endorse subsequent versions of the Arden Syntax.
  • Finalize and endorse any standards for representation of clinical guidelines that may become part of HL7 standards.
  • Finalize and endorse an expression language for clinical decision support
  • Identify existing HL7 messages and triggers that might be usable for decision support.
  • Define messages into the logic engine during patient care.
  • Define messages out of the logic engine for administrative purposes (i.e. publishing the rule) to the event monitor.
  • Define query messages and responses between the logic engine and the data repository.
  • Contribute representations of these messages and other objects required by decision support applications to the HL7 Reference Information Model.
  • Develop outreach/publicity activities.
  • Document clinical decision support services required.
Develop use cases for terminology mediation services in cooperation with the Vocabulary TC.
  • Define messages between the clinical decision support system and other entities (e.g., electronic patient record or a user interface).
  • Develop guideline representation(s) (both for documents and computable forms).
  • Help develop authoring, demonstration and validation software tools.

Formal Relationships with Other HL7 Groups

The TC sponsors both the Arden Syntax SIG and the GLIF Clinical Guidelines SIG. Technology-specific work in these SIGs will inform the general modeling efforts of the TC. In turn, these SIGs will apply ideas developed in the TC in the further development of knowledge representation for Arden Syntax and clinical guidelines, respectively. The TC will coordinate efforts with Control Query TC. The TC will work with the Structured Documents TC.

Formal Relationships with Groups Outside of HL7

NONE

Date of Last Revision

DRAFT. 28 December 2000 (by John Dulcey after discussion with Mark Shafarman during ARB conference call)Approved by the TSC on January 8, 2001. Edited by the TC on January 10, 2001.Approved by the TSC on May 7, 2001.