Certification Frequency and Requirements

  Earlier this quarter, ONC and CMS requested information on program requirements for certification frequency for reporting quality measures. Lantana Consulting Group supports eMeasure development and has a sharp interest…

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Quality C-CDAs can lead to Quality Reporting

As standards developers and data analysts, we rely on finding patterns in our day to day work. We apply our patented “pattern recognition algorithm” (note: not a real patent) to identify the questions our clients ask most often. “How can we leverage our healthcare data to perform quality reporting?” Closely followed by, “and can we use C-CDA to import that data into our analytics environment?” Although we’d prefer a simple “yes”, the solution is rarely simple.

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CDA in the Wild – Introduction

Shh…
…beyond the bushes ahead you will see the Wild CDA in its natural habitat…
Lantana Consulting Group presents the first installment of CDA in the Wild by Rick Geimer, a blog series that identifies top errors found in CDAs (and how to fix them).

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We go greenLantana

greenLantana is the name of our collective effort to measure, evaluate, and improve the corporate, social, and environmental impacts of our Lantana way of doing business. As the name suggests, our initiative emphasizes environmental responsibility and includes support for “corporate social responsibility”[1] and the “triple bottom line”.[2]

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What Does LTPAC Want – for Interoperability?

The Long-Term and Post-Acute Care (LTPAC) Health IT (HIT) Collaborative held its 10th Annual Summit in Baltimore at the end of June. HIT leaders, policy makers, providers, and vendors, convened to discuss industry initiatives and priorities from the Collaborative’s latest Roadmap for Health IT in LTPAC. We participated in and attended several sessions on continuity of care and quality reporting.

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The Lifecycle of a Template – Part 1: Stability and Progress

A template’s inaugural design often doesn’t seem like a “version”. It is difficult for designers while working closely to solve a problem, to envision that someday, perhaps even in the not too distant future, the solution they are in the midst of creating will need to change. And so it is with templates.

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Wash, rinse, and repeat (Part 2)

My last blog post detailed some of the features of Trifolia that help make my life as an information analyst easier. In this post, I discuss the part of the…

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Trifolia, how do I love thee? Let Me Count the Ways (Part 1)

I’ve worked with various incarnations of HL7 Implementation Guides (IG) for roughly 8 years. My first exposure was in the UK with the NHS Connecting for Health’s Message Implementation Manual (MIM) for V3 messages. I wasn’t involved in building this specification, but I did use it for coding. Later, I was responsible for creating the Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) IGs for Australia’s national eHealth program. Back then, these were manually created Word documents that evolved into partially automated DocBook created PDF documents.

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Free Text Sig

Discord is afoot. It has been for some time now. The cause is a little understood data element known as “Free Text Sig”.

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CDA Experts on FHIR

At Lantana, we are all pretty comfortable working with CDA. I think we are also pretty open to understanding its limitations. The current CDA, Release 2, was developed ten years ago. It was designed to meet a range of requirements from simple, transformed-from-dictation documents to fully coded, semantically interoperable reports. A key design consideration, a requirement for passing ballot within HL7 at that time, was full compatibility with Version 3 messaging and an explicit tie-in to the Reference Information Model (RIM).

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