HISO update on data standards

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HISO, the governing body for health and disability information standards, has published two new standards supporting the National Bowel Screening Programme: a data standard for histology reporting and a related HL7 messaging specification. The standards ensure that bowel screening data captured by laboratories is high quality and properly communicated.

The Ministry of Health is moving towards improved recording of emergency department visits by district health boards. As a key part of this, we have introduced standard SNOMED CT reference sets for chief presenting complaint, diagnosis and procedure details in emergency care.

Auckland, Canterbury, Nelson-Marlborough and Bay of Plenty DHBs are working with the Ministry as early adopters of SNOMED in their ED information systems. Their experiences will be shared with other DHBs, who are asked to prepare for their own implementations.

At the Ministry, the National Non-Admitted Patients Collection has been enhanced and is now receiving the first SNOMED-coded ED visit data from the above DHBs. By implementing SNOMED in EDs, we will be able to gain a real understanding of acute care demand and make better decisions for service delivery, improving equity and patient outcomes.

HISO has also recently posted a statement recognising the Patient Summary Standards Set from the Joint Initiative Council for global health informatics standardisation. These standards provide a framework and useful starting point for the design of many elements of the personal health dataset in the first tranche of the national Health Information Platform.

Standards in development include an update to the maternity care summary standard that extends the standard to the full maternity journey. The HISO working group for maternity is presently considering feedback received from public comment and will prepare a final draft for publication in the near future.

HISO also welcomes three new committee members: 

• Nader Fattah, medical advisor at Think Hauora in the MidCentral area and a practising GP, is the primary care representative
• Stan Stanilov leads standards development at Standards NZ
• John Carter is CTO at HealthLink and the NZHIT-nominated industry representative.

HISO is partnering with SNOMED International to deliver SNOMED developer education days in Christchurch and Auckland in the first week of November. These practical workshops are for developers learning how to use the free and open source tools and APIs in their software products.

More information on HISO is available on the Ministry of Health website..

Source: Ministry of Health media release, 22 October 2019

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