The Sequoia Project Publishes Health Data Usability Implementation Guide

The Sequoia Project has released the final version of its "Data Usability Implementation Guide," which offers guidance to improve health data usability to benefit patient care.

The final resource created by The Sequoia Project's Interoperability Matters Data Usability Workgroup spans six categories, including:

• Data provenance and traceability of changes
• Effective use of codes
• Reducing the impact of duplicates
• Data integrity and trust
• Data tagging and searchability
• Effective use of narrative for data usability

The Data Usability Implementation Guide encompasses identified priority use cases for adoption within health information exchange (HIE) vendors, implementers, networks, governance frameworks, and testing programs.

Earlier this year, The Sequoia Project sought public feedback on a draft of the implementation guide and received more than 120 comments.

"This much-needed implementation guide delivers real-world data usability recommendations for health information networks and communities to enhance the usability of the health data shared by and between providers, public health, patients, and others," Mariann Yeager, CEO of The Sequoia Project, said in a public statement.

"Getting the guide over the finish line was the result of intense collaboration among more than 360 members of this public workgroup," Yeager said. "The Sequoia Project appreciates their teamwork and the public feedback received from the broader healthcare and health IT community."

The implementation guide can enable semantic interoperability between sending and receiving systems to more directly incorporate shared data into a clinician's workflow, Didi Davis, vice president of informatics, conformance, and interoperability at The Sequoia Project emphasized.

"We thank the workgroup chairs and all the members for their time, energy and talent put toward this final draft and look forward to building on their efforts to benefit the healthcare ecosystem and communities," Davis continued.