Medical+Summary+Document+Project

=NHIN Exchange Content - Medical Summary Docment= Project Activities: Requirements Definition, Spec and Implementation Guide, Test Strategy and Tools

Scope Definition
The NHIN Exchange seeks to define a strategy for the exchange of Medical Summary documents and to collaborate with ONC and the HIT Standards Community to define and adopt interoperability specification(s) that support various Exchange Participants’ program requirements. Further, the Exchange seeks to ease the implementation of Medical Summary standards by collaborating with the HIT Standards Community and with the Model Driven Health Tools (MDHT) project to reconcile issues in the underlying standards, to author and publish implementation guides, and to develop and adopt validation tools.

**Objectives**
1) Establish a set of requirements for the exchange of Medical Summaries among participants in the NHIN Exchange. 2) Define and adopt a Medical Summary interoperability specification, and to publish an Implementation Guide. 3) Develop a conformance testing strategy and implement a validation tool.

Current State
The current convention is to allow originators of Medical Summaries the flexibility to determine document content, with the requirement that resulting Medical Summary conform to the HITSP C32 specification. This approach arose due to an inability among NHIN Exchange participants to define a common, minimum data set. With the intent to maximize the exchange of standards based Medical Summaries, the decision reached in late 2009 was to allow authors to include those C32 content modules they are able to populate, but not to mandate any beyond those required in the C32 specification.

While the current approach allows NHIN Exchange to leverage the flexibility built in to CCD and C32 to maximize the exchange of medical summary documents, it presents challenges in terms of the ability to support specific programs’ interoperability requirements.

Desired State
NHIN Exchange will continue promote the flexible exchange of Medical Summary documents that conform to the ‘framework’ level requirements set forth in C32. The Exchange will also define requirements and publish interoperability specification(s) for Medical Summaries intended to address specific Program or other interoperability requirements. The intent is to enable the exchange to specify constrained medical summaries that meet specific program requirements, while at the same time continuing to support the flexibility built in to the underlying standards.