The Standards Charter Organization

I've received several emails about the Standards Charter Organization (SCO) recently announced in a press release.

Some folks have asked if SCO is the successor to HITSP or if it changes the landscape of standards harmonization efforts. I've been very close to the work of the SCO, which has been closely aligned with the HITSP Foundations Committee. The SCO is complementary not competitive with HITSP. Here's the full story.

Several standards organizations, NCPDP, HL7, X12 and ASTM, recognized that their individual efforts have organization specific priorities, scope, and component elements such as code sets.

Working together, the SDOs can coordinate their approach to more rapidly close gaps in standards, use common code sets in all their work products and avoid the development of overlapping standards.

By doing this, their individual work products will be "pre-harmonized" in many ways, making the work of HITSP, CCHIT, and implementation guide writers much easier.

The SCO process is just beginning. My hope is that the SCO will work with HITSP in a three ways

* HITSP will be able to hand off gaps in standards to the SCO for assignment to individual SDOs

* The SCO will identify cross-SDO projects and hand them off to the HITSP Foundations Committee for harmonization. Foundations has already worked on creating common code sets such as gender and marital status

* As we all work together to create a Nationwide Health Information Network, the "pre-harmonized" work products from the SDOs will accelerate interoperability

Thus, I completely support the efforts of the SCO. HITSP, SCO, and the HIT Standards Committee are all important parts of the interoperability ecosystem with different roles and responsibilities.