Health information standards define how particular kinds of health information should be structured and how the meaning of the clinical information should be stored by computers so that the information can reliably be understood and used by any computer system, regardless of the location and kind of system being used
Health information is complicated and there are many different kinds of standard that are needed in order to cover the totality of all of the information. This might be content within an electronic health record of the hospital or general practice, information held by patients on smartphones, or by other organisations like social care, education and public health agencies.
Understanding the structure of health data
Some standards focus on how information should be structured, so that the details of somebody’s symptoms, physical examination findings, test results, treatments or other more complicated information such as x-ray images, scans and ECGs are stored and communicated in the same way. The majority of structural standards for health information are known as information model standards.
Understanding the meaning of health data
Other kinds of standards focus on precisely defining the meaning of health information facts. An example would be an organised vocabulary of all of the different possible diagnoses that a human could have. Another example would be an organised catalogue of all of the possible prescribable medicines. These organised sets of concepts, or terms, are known as terminology standards.
Another family of standards focus on communication, specifying how health information should be transmitted between systems.
Combined and/or specific health standards
Some standards are quite specific about how certain kinds of information should be organised. For example, there are standards for an electronic prescription and for a general patient summary. These standards combine some structural and some terminology elements for the particular kind of information being standardised.
There are also more specific standards for medical images such as x-rays, for microscopic images of cells such as cancer cells or bacteria, standards for ECGs and other kinds of electronic signals, and standards for genetic information.
There are also specialist standards dealing with information security (such as cybersecurity) and data protection.
However, a lot of these are not specific to health care and are needed for many different kinds of information. In general, health professionals try to avoid making standards that are already well covered by more general standards, such as standards for passwords.
