Behavioral Health HL7 Interest Group

Mission and Charter

Explanation of Need

The ability to collect, share, and use behavioral health information is essential to optimizing decision making at the point-of-care and creating an efficient learning health system (LHS). The behavioral health sector is currently undergoing an exponential increase in the use of health information technologies such as EHRs. In the absence of appropriate, accessible standards and clear guidance around how to use the standards, each vendor is creating proprietary information models using idiosyncratic value sets not mapped to coded terminologies. The large number of distinct EHR products, combined with the multitude of small-scale implementations, each housing data for a relatively small number of consumers, makes standardizing behavioral health information on the front end essential. The ability to use inherently fragmented behavioral health data to improve outcomes depends on the robust use of standard information models across EHRs.

The Behavioral Health Special Interest Group (BH-SIG) has formed with the explicit goal of providing these models. In addition to providing common information models, BH-SIG will work to define and develop a process for efficiently synchronizing the development of standards with the real-world, here-and-now needs of providers, provider organizations, and HER vendors. The workgroup seeks to make the implementation and evaluation of the standards as much a part of our work as the development of the standards themselves.

Mission

Improve the usability of behavioral health information by developing new, and enhancing existing, standards to address the unique needs of behavioral health.

Charter

The Behavioral Health Special Interest Group will collaborate with other HL7 Work Groups to create and enhance standards to allow communities to more effectively collect, share, and use behavioral health information to improve health outcomes. We will propose enhancements to existing clinical terminologies to enable the mapping of BH data routinely captured in EHRs to standard codes. We will also collaborate with CIMI to make relevant information models available in the CIMI-managed repository, and with the Vocabulary WG to create appropriate terminology bindings for the proposed information models. Finally, the SIG will work closely with stewards of service standards to ensure that standards enabling clinical decision support, data exchange, quality measurement, and public health reporting can be fully leveraged with the information defined by new BH content standards.

The creation of information models will be prioritized based on stakeholder need and readiness to implement, as well as potential to impact behavioral health outcomes. Initial work will address needs for standards formally requested by behavioral health workgroups previously convened under the auspices of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) and the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC), including Technical Expert Panels (TEPs) convened by the ONC, NIDA, and SAMHSA.