Leveraging standards to support patient-centric interdisciplinary plans of care

As health care systems and providers move towards meaningful use of electronic health records, the once distant vision of collaborative patient-centric, interdisciplinary plans of care, generated and updated across organizations and levels of care, may soon become a reality. Effective care planning is included in the proposed Stages 2-3 Meaningful Use quality measures. To facilitate interoperability, standardization of plan of care messaging, content, information and terminology models are needed. This degree of standardization requires local and national coordination. The purpose of this paper is to review some existing standards that may be leveraged to support development of interdisciplinary patient-centric plans of care. Standards are then applied to a use case to demonstrate one method for achieving patient-centric and interoperable interdisciplinary plan of care documentation. Our pilot work suggests that existing standards provide a foundation for adoption and implementation of patient-centric plans of care that are consistent with federal requirements.