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Editor's note: This update replaces the 2007 practice brief "Data Standards, Data Quality, and Interoperability."
Data quality and consistency are critical to ensuring patient safety, communicating delivery of health services, coordinating care, and healthcare reporting. Assessing the quality and consistency of data requires data standards. This practice brief provides health information management (HIM) professionals with a clear understanding of data standards as a tool to enable interoperability and promote data quality.
The online version of this practice brief, available in AHIMA's HIM Body of Knowledge, is accompanied by an appendix that provides HIM professionals with a list of standards to reference in data dictionary development, electronic health records, the exchange of health information, and general data management processes to ensure information integrity and reliability. Evaluation of data validity, reliability, completeness, and timeliness are accomplished through a combination of human and machine processes in healthcare, and the list of data standard sources is a helpful reference guide when more detailed information is required.
Data Standards and Regulatory Framework
Data standards are "documented agreements on representations, formats, and definitions of common data. Data standards provide a method to codify invalid, meaningful, comprehen- sive, and actionable ways, information captured in the course of doing business."1 Rules to describe how the data is recorded to ensure consistency across multiple sources is another way to think of data standards. Without data standards and data quality, the future of interoperability is bleak. Data fields and the content of those fields need to be standardized.
Standards development organizations (SDOs) address a variety of aspects of health information and informatics. For example, the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) and Health Level Seven (HL7) target clinical data standards. Insurance and remittance standards are a focus of the Accredited Standards Committee (ASC) X12. Standards to transmit diagnostic images are developed through Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM). The National Council for Prescription Drug Programs (NCPDP) represents pharmacy messages.
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), HL7, ASTM, and others develop data models and frameworks. See the table on page 65 for a breakdown of regulatory agencies responsible for working with the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) to drive data standards to achieve interoperability.
The AHIMA Leadership Model states that HIM professionals...