Development and multi-institutional implementation of coding and transmission standards for health outcomes data

Health care delivery institutions and providers, employers, and government agencies throughout the U.S. are sharing information and pooling resources in an attempt to produce reliable measurements of health outcomes. The rapid rate of growth in the collection and pooling of health outcomes data has prompted the need for standardization. The work of health care organizations and consortiums pooling data would be greatly facilitated by widely accepted standards for the coding and transmitting of outcomes data. Moreover, standards allow for the inter-operation of data capture products, data analysis tools, and data pooling services developed by a variety of different vendors. The Health Outcomes Institute (HOI) and Henry Ford Health System (HFHS) have developed and maintain a database of health outcomes questions which provides a mechanism for uniquely coding data elements. HFHS and the American Medical Group Association (AMGA) have created a software tool to facilitate the conversion and transmission of health outcomes data elements in an American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM)/Health Level Seven (HL7) format, which incorporates HOI question standards.