PCC TF-1/XDS-MS
Cross-Enterprise Sharing of Medical Summaries (XDS-MS) Integration Profile
Scope and Purpose
Patient, clinician, industry and governmental demands for improved healthcare quality have created increased focus to make patient healthcare information interoperability across disparate systems a reality.
A solution for interoperability is, however, not a simple undertaking. Unstructured textual data forms remains the predominate mechanism for information exchange among health care providers, and a good majority of data needed by physicians and other health care providers to make good clinical decisions is embedded in this free text. Efficient and effective interoperability therefore begins by identifying the most relevant documents and the most relevant sections within those documents.
By their nature, Medical Summaries form a class of clinical documents that contain the most relevant portions of this information. As the name would indicate they have the purpose of summarizing, both abstracting the most important pieces of information from the EMR and recording free-text summaries at the time of medical summary creation. Operationally, they are commonly created at points in time of transfers of care from one provider to another or from one setting to another.
Patient transfers and, therefore, the summary documents that accompany these transfers can be categorized into 3 primary types: Episodic, Collaborative, or Permanent. These categories are important because they represent a breadth of use case scenarios for Medical Summaries. For example, summaries for collaborative transfers of care such as referral notes have a focused objective for providing the most relevant information about the patient intended for a specific provider. Collaborative summaries have a general audience that is generated as an artifact since they also provide the most relevant spot to obtain information about specific classes of patient problems that the patient has.
By contrast, episodic summaries have the primary purpose of highlighting the most relevant details of focused periods of time in a patient history. Examples include discharge summaries or history and physicals. Episodic summaries are written for a broad audience by intent.
Permanent transfers have yet a third purpose of summarizing the entirety of a patient's medical history and therefore covers a broader range of patient problems. The audience may be focused (as in a transfer to a new provider) or general (as in a discharge from the military).
The challenge is to identify the clinically relevant documents (and data elements those documents contain) that are used in typical "transfer of care" scenarios and then to provide interoperability standards to promote ease in transmission of those documents (and data elements). The Cross-Enterprise Sharing of Medical Summary (XDS-MS) Integration Profile facilitates this by defining the appropriate standards for document transmission and a minimum set of "record entries" that should be forwarded or made available to subsequent care provider(s) during specific transfer of care scenarios. In addition, this integration profile needs to define the utilization requirements/options for the receiving entity in order to ensure that the "care context" of the sending entity is appropriately maintained following the information transfer.
Process Flow
The basic process flow supported by XDS-MS mirrors current manual practices: someone gathers the appropriate documents from the patient medical record, copies them, packages them up with a cover letter explaining the reason the information is being sent, and then ships the package to the receiving provider. This is often accompanied by a telephone call from the sending provider to the receiving provider that indicates that such information is forthcoming.
Because the Collaborative care transfers and Episodic Care transfers differ significantly, these two use cases are defined. Users or implementers of this Integration Profile are offered options in the support of either of these two use cases. Permanent Care Summaries also differ significantly. However their use is less frequent; so this use case was deferred for future work.
Use Case 1: Ambulatory Specialist Referral
This use case involves a "collaborative" transfer of care for the referral of a patient from a primary care provider (PCP) to a specialist. This use case is a central component of an "e-referral" process, which typically requires an appropriate level of agreement/collaboration between the two parties prior to the actual transfer of clinical information being initiated.
The preconditions assume a PCP sees a patient in his office. The PCP has talked to the patient and performed an examination, and has decided to refer the patient to a specialist. An assumption is made that the PCP has an EMR system with capability to write notes and manage data elements. The specific data elements managed by the PCP's EMR are expected to be the source for the information used in creating the medical summary document related to this transfer of care. A variety of EMR implementations and usage by clinicians may result in some variability in the content of the medical summary.
The detailed content of the medical summary to support this use case will be detailed as part of the document content profile specification (See PCC TF-2: 5.4.1.3).
Steps to identify the specialist and obtain insurance preauthorization have been placed out of scope for this Integration Profile.
Post conditions include the specialist physician receiving the notification of referral, locating the documents (via the Document Registry), retrieving the Documents and viewing them and optionally importing data. Import assumes the specialist with an EMR system with the capability for managing those discrete data elements.
Use Case 2: Acute Care Discharge to Ambulatory Care Environment
This use case involves an episodic transfer of care in the form of a patient discharge from a hospital to home. The attending physician in the hospital generates a discharge summary document that is used by the hospital record keeping and billing abstraction. The attending physician in the hospital may or may not also be serving as the ambulatory PCP. If not, a copy of this record is sent to the PCP as well as other specialist providers that will have ambulatory follow-up care.
The events of the use case involve creation of the discharge summary, sharing it, and notifying other providers such as the PCP's office and the surgeon's office.
The post conditions include the receipt and viewing of the discharge summary with optional import into the ambulatory EMR system.
The detailed content of the medical summary to support this use case will be detailed as part of the document content profile specification (See PCC TF-2: 5.4.1.4).
Note that the two use cases above use the same set of transactions and differs only in the content of the Medical Summary. A process flow for these use cases using XDS and NAV is listed in Figure 3.2 1. Other process flows are possible using XDM and/or XDR.
These steps are:
- Extract/capture a collection of records into a set of documents packaged as an XDS Submission Set. This submission contains a Medical Summary, and may contain a number of other related clinical documents. Medical Summaries are clinical documents (already known in the paper world), which often serve a dual purpose of documenting an encounter, while providing the rationale for sending the information to another provider. This step utilizes the transactions provided by the ITI XDS profile to place the records in an XDS Repository (local or shared).
- The Repository ensures that the documents of the submission set are registered with the XDS Registry of the Affinity Domain (set of cooperating care delivery institutions).
- Notify the other provider that documents are now available for review. This step utilizes the transactions provided by the ITI NAV profile to perform the e-mail notification.
- The e-mail notification that contains no patient identified information is received by the specialist EMR system.
- The receiving provider can then utilize existing query transactions from the XDS profile to find the URL of the Documents.
- Finally, the receiving provider may choose to display the document, or import relevant information from these records into their own EMR system.
Use Case for Unplanned Access to past Medical Summaries
In many cases, a provider may need to assess information from the patient care history, and patients may have Medical Summaries in the XDS repository from prior visits to other providers. For example, Medical Summaries, as well as other documents such as laboratory and radiology reports are critical for emergency physicians and nurses to provide the best care to patient in acute conditions. Figure 3.2 2 shows the transactions required for this use case, again, using XDS. Other process flows are possible using XDM and/or XDR.
Content Interoperability Levels
The use cases described above imply different levels of interoperability. At the lowest level, a clinician simply needs to be able to access and view some content such as a medical summary. At this level, minimal structured data elements must be present – just enough metadata to verify that access to that document can be accessed appropriately associated with a visual representation of the document.
Beyond this simple metadata, nearly all medical summary documents have organizational elements that group the relevant parts of the medical summary. For humans this allows for more rapid review because it is easier to skip to portions of interest for care. Computers too can take advantage of this structuring. For example, it is relevant to see the list of discharge medications from a discharge summary in relation to current medications for comparison and reconciliation.
At a very high level of interoperability, the ability to pass fully structured and codified data is necessary for computer processing and mapping. For example, the ability to import medications identified in medical summaries from another institution could have tremendous potential for ensuring that medication orders are transferred correctly. Unfortunately, the cost for providing high levels of semantic interoperability is increased complexity of implementation, and therefore long implementation times.
The HL7 Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) standard and Care Record Summary (CRS) CDA implementation guides support progressive interoperability at multiple levels of complexity, from those needed to provide simple low level interoperability for supporting the most important use case of simple viewing to those providing a path to progressively higher levels of interoperability for vendors and providers wishing to implement it. CDA as constrained in the CRS implementation guides is therefore the base standard for the XDS-MS content profile.
The XDS-MS content profile builds on and further constrains the CDA-CRS implementation guide by defining the required and optional sections required for the Acute Care Discharge and Specialist Referral use cases. Additionally, it places constraints for the most important sections (Medication, Allergy and Problems) of Medical Summaries to ensure that structured field level data are provided.
The figure below shows how the XDS-MS Content profile defines these progressive levels of interoperability for sections of different importance. Header metadata must be present and coded. Most sections must define, at minimum, a section label to identify that section. For the Medication, Allergy, and Problems Sections, data must contain a more granular field level data as discrete text (for example dose or frequency). This is referred to as structured textual representation. Note that the textual strings in this structured text are not duplicates of the textual strings in the human readable text, but simply referenced extracts from the human readable text content, reducing the risk for inconsistencies
Granular field level data may then be optionally coded. If any coded terminology is used it shall be uniquely identified.
| Note: The lack of mature and broadly accepted standards for coded terminology requires that this integration profile not specify specific coded vocabularies. However, when agreements can be reached, the capability to exchange coded level information is possible. IHE has on its roadmap to continue working with appropriate standards bodies so that coded terminology standards can be added to this profile in the future. |
Use Case Conclusion
The process flow of this profile exhibits a great deal more power and flexibility than the existing manual process. The physician workflow is improved by reusing an existing work product in the very first step (the summary report) to accomplish two purposes: recording care that has been provided, and communicating with another provider.
Secondly, each step utilizes the power of inter-connected EMR systems to make the entire process faster, easier, and less reliant on human labor to accomplish the same feats. This results in reduced time to transfer records between providers, safer transport of the information, and more reliable receipt.
Lastly, the process facilitates the import of relevant data from one set of patient records to the receiving physicians EMR system, resulting in more reliable transfer of information, reduced labor costs transferring information from one provider to another and less time required by the patient to provide information that is already in the physician's possession.