About The Health Story Project
Approximately 1.2 billion clinical documents are produced in the United States each year. These documents comprise around 60% of clinical information, the majority of physician-attested information and are used as the primary source of information for reimbursement and proof of service. This tremendous source of clinical information is underutilized in current computer-based record systems.
Health Story is an alliance of healthcare vendors, providers and associations that pooled resources over the previous three years in a rapid-development initiative to produce data standards for the flow of information between common types of healthcare documents and electronic health records.
Health Story has an Associate Charter Agreement with Health Level Seven and works with related organizations toward harmonization. Eight technical implementation guides supported by Health Story are now available as HL7 standards and draft standards for trial use, and a project was recently completed with HL7/IHE and ONC to consolidate the guides into one package along with the HL7 Continuity of Care Document (CCD) standard. There remain important document types to be defined as well as work to support their implementation. In addition, industry must be informed about the availability of the standards and about the essential role and benefits of electronic documents.
Health Story provided a demonstration at the HIMSS12 Interoperability Showcase showing how to maximize the information available to the EHR to maintain the patient story using all available channels, from unstructured, scanned documents to dictated consult notes and discharge summaries and notes enriched with abstractor, computer-assisted and NLP coding. The use case applies standards and profiles for clinical document exchange, published through the HL7/IHE Health Story Consolidation Project in conjunction with the ONC Standards & Interoperability Framework.
The HIMSS Analytics study now includes questions on hospital readiness for Meaningful Use of Electronic Medical Record systems, including use of structured templates developed by the Health Story Project. You can learn more about this study here.
