Landen went to Phoenix AZ for the first IHE face-to-face meeting of 2010. The four day meeting was particularly productive. CDISC participates in the Quality, Research, and Public Health (QRPH, rhymes with Smurf) domain. The integration profiles under development that directly influence CDISC’s Healthcare link initiative are Retrieve Protocol for Execution (RPE) and Redaction Services. QRPH schedules its face-to-face meetings with two other IHE domains (there are 14 in all): Information Technology Infrastructure (ITI) and Patient Care Coordination (PCC).
RPE has been taken up by public health, specifically two profiles from CDC, and by quality reporting. The idea of RPE is to automate workflow between external agencies and the EHR. So, for example, RPE could automate the execution of some research protocol steps within an EHR such as patient selection, scheduling study visits, etc. Public health and quality also have processes that they want the EHR to execute, but they don’t call them protocols. So to make the profile more generic and applicable, we re-named it Retrieve Process for Execution, retaining the RPE acronym. RPE has now been formally tested at the Connectathon in January, and a number of changes resulting from that first exposure are under consideration. Several EHRs and one registry company – Outcome Sciences – have tested RPE.
Redaction is in its embryonic state, and is garnering much attention. Davera Gabriel of UC Davis and Gary Walker of Quintiles are co-editors along with Landen. Redaction will allow EHRs to export a standard document, something which most US based companies have done for certification purposes already, and to then ‘redact’ unwanted data and use the redacted document to pre-populate a form or send straight to a pre-arranged participant. This amounts to a scheme of ad hoc data mining that, once again, is attractive to Public Health and Quality reporting groups as well.
IHE has been a fruitful activity in solving problems with the EHR vendor community. As a bonus, CDISC’s leadership has created solutions that have proven useful to other secondary use of EHR data recipients.
