The Center for Aging Services Technologies (CAST), a program of the American Association of Homes and Services for the Aging, and the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) announce an initiative to develop requirements, recommendations, guidelines and standards advocacy towards the adoption of an HL7 implementation guide for an aging services Continuity of Care Document (CCD) with support for functional status and wellness content.

CAST has worked for two years to scope out a set of work that would materially advance the ability for aging services organizations to leverage standards based health information exchange. It is our contention aging services organizations must leverage existing and emerging standards to support sharing of electronic personal health and wellness information across aging services care settings both within and across organizations and, most importantly, with consumer’s own personal health records. We believe that an HL7 approved CCD for aging services with support for functional status and wellness content will be an important foundation for realizing health and wellness information sharing. Our goal is to initiate work that will result in an HL7 approved implementation guide, progress standards related to functional status and wellness content, and complete formal interoperability demonstrations of vendor, provider and consumer uses.

The early stage deliverables of this initiative include:

• Development of a reference set of aging services Use Cases supporting aging services (vendor, provider and consumer) requirements for functional status and wellness content and electronic document exchange.
• Assemble an Assessment Catalog of candidate assessments, terminologies, tools, instruments and other contributions relevant to capturing and sharing functional and wellness content in personal electronic health records.
• Explore whether to propose a minimum content set, with terminology mapping for the same, for inclusion of functional and wellness status in a CCD and/or identify privileged assessments/contents (from catalog) for optional inclusion in CCD and specify any appropriate terminology mapping to support this inclusion.
• Develop formal structure (clinical statement implementation) to use for inclusion of functional and wellness content in CCD.

CAST and AHIMA are engaging stakeholders to participate in the development of our initial deliverables. In order to gain the broadest input and validation of the work, we seek participants at three levels:

Work Group Participants of the core task group meeting weekly by conference call through January 31, 2007

A “reactor panel” providing periodic review and comment on the task group’s work

Parties interested in high level updates on the progress of the task group

Based on successful completion of this initial phase, CAST hopes to attain funding for later phases that will include securing HL7 adoption of a specialized CCD implementation guide, and facilitation of broad interoperability demonstration efforts based on the guide.