Collaboration between the medical informatics community and guideline authors: fostering HIT standard development...

Clinical guideline authors, health information technology (HIT) standards development organizations, and information system implementers all work to improve the processes of healthcare, but have long functioned independently towards realizing these goals. This has led to clinical standards of care that often poorly align with the functional and technical HIT standards developed to realize them. We describe the shortcomings and inefficiencies inherent in this current process and introduce two national initiatives that attempt to unite these communities. The mission of these two initiatives is to create examples of unambiguous, decidable, and executable clinical guidelines which both utilize and inform HIT terminology and logical expression standards. All of the products of this work aim to facilitate enterprise-wide guideline implementation and create a rising tide which lifts all ships.