vrdr

The VRDR FHIR IG provides guidance regarding the use of FHIR resources for the bidirectional exchange of mortality data between State-run PHA Vital Records offices and NCHS.

The scope of this project is to produce and ballot a Standard for Trial Use (STU) Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) implementation guide (IG) for use in reporting of death events to the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) by State and Local Public Health Agencies (PHA). Bidirectional exchange of mortality data between PHA Vital Records offices and NCHS is essential to effective public health surveillance and emergency response efforts. Automation of the reporting process adds efficiencies that dramatically improves the efficacy of event response, data analysis, and evidence-based measurable prevention of the causes of death.

The VRDR FHIR IG will provide guidance for the use of standard FHIR resources as a conduit for data required by vital records death reporting. The use of FHIR as a platform for the automation of vital records death reporting is expected to improve existing automation by enabling wide-scale adoption and leveraging the potential of electronic health records and clinical decision support systems.

The VRDR FHIR IG will lay a foundation for the expansion of automated standards-driven information exchange to include tributary flows of information from entities such as physicians, medical examiners, coroners, funeral directors, and family members to public health agencies and between public health agencies and secondary users of detailed mortality data and aggregate statistics.

The sponsoring workgroup for this project is the HL7 Public Health workgroup. Funding for non-volunteer project resources is provided by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). The project facilitators are Hetty Khan, a Health informatics Scientist at CDC/NCHS and Paula Braun, Data Science Entrepreneur at CDC. The project modeling and publication facilitator is AbdulMAlik Shakir, President, Hi3 Solutions, Inc.