HL7 Technical Committee or
Special Interest Group
Mission and Charter Statement
Group Name: Clinical Decision Support Technical Committee
Mission
This group supports the HL7 mission to create and promote its standards by working on
issues related to single-patient-focused health care decision support messaging. The
committee will focus on development of messages independent of any implementation
of clinical logic. The TC will also be responsible for support and development of Arden
Syntax for Medical Logic Systems as well as a standard for representation of clinical
guidelines. These will serve as test cases in the development of general messaging
schemes.
The role of this TC is to (a) identify the scope and range of data elements required for
the functionality of decision support applications, (b) work with other SIGs, TCs, or
outside organizations to identify appropriate controlled vocabulary for encoding those
data elements, (c) identify or define messages (and objects) required to support the
specific information exchange needs of decision support applications, both as feeders to
decision support applications and as output from decision support applications.
Charter
Work Products and Contributions to HL7 Processes
Work will focus on patient-centered monitoring, alerts and reminders.
 Finalize and endorse subsequent versions of the Arden Syntax.
 Finalize and endorse any standards for representation of clinical guidelines that
may become part of HL7.
 Finalize and endorse an expression language for clinical decision support
 Identify existing HL7 messages and triggers that might be usable for decision
support.
 Define messages into the logic engine during patient care.
 Define messages out of the logic engine for administrative purposes (i.e.
publishing the rule) to the event monitor.
 Define query messages and responses between the logic engine and the data
repository.
 Contribute representations of these messages and other objects required by
decision support applications to the HL7 Reference Information Model.
 Develop outreach/publicity activities.
 Document clinical decision support services required.
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Develop use cases for terminology mediation services in cooperation with the
Vocabulary TC.
Define messages between the clinical decision support system and other entities
(e.g., electronic patient record or a user interface).
Develop guideline representation(s) (both for documents and computable forms).
Help develop authoring, demonstration and validation software tools.
Formal Relationships with Other HL7 Groups
The TC sponsors both the Arden Syntax SIG and the Clinical Guidelines SIG.
Technology-specific work in these SIGs will inform the general modeling efforts of the
TC. In turn, these SIGs will apply ideas developed in the TC in the further development
of knowledge representation for Arden Syntax and clinical guidelines, respectively. The
TC will coordinate efforts with Control Query TC. The TC will work with the Structured
Documents TC.
Formal Relationships with Groups Outside of HL7
NONE
Date of Last Revision
Approved by the TSC on May 7, 2001.