Health IT Acronyms

Three Letter Acronym

Standards Development Organization

Draft Standard for Trial Use

Health Information Technology (also HealthIT)

Technical Committee

Technical Report

Working Group

(Special) Interest Group

• Advanced Encryption Standard
• In cryptography, the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is a symmetric-key encryption standard adopted by the U.S. government.

• American National Standards Institute (1918)
• Mission- To enhance both the global competitiveness of U.S. business and the U.S. quality of life by promoting and facilitating voluntary consensus standards and conformity assessment systems, and safeguarding their integrity.

Healthcare IT Standards Panel (2005-2010) a cooperative partnership between the public and private sectors. The Panel was formed for the purpose of harmonizing and integrating standards that will meet clinical and business needs for sharing information among organizations and systems.

• American Society for Testing and Materials now ASTM International (1898)
• ASTM International, formerly known as the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM), is a globally recognized leader in the development and delivery of international voluntary consensus standards.

• HL7 Clinical Document Architecture
• The CDA Release 2.0 provides an exchange model for clinical documents (such as discharge summaries and progress notes) - and brings the healthcare industry closer to the realization of an electronic medical record. By leveraging the use of XML, the HL7 Reference Information Model (RIM) and coded vocabularies, the CDA makes documents both machine-readable - so they are easily parsed and processed electronically - and human-readable - so they can be easily retrieved and used by the people who need them.

• HL7 Continuity of Care Document (a CDA implementation of CCR)
• HL7 and ASTM International created the Continuity of Care Document (CCD) to integrate two complementary healthcare data specifications ASTM’s Continuity of Care Record (CCR) and HL7’s Clinical Document Architecture (CDA).

• ASTM Continuity of Care Record (E2369-05)
• The Continuity of Care Record (CCR) is a core data set of the most relevant administrative, demographic, and clinical information facts about a patient's healthcare, covering one or more healthcare encounters.

• Canada Health Infoway
• Infoway is an independent not-for-profit corporation created by Canada’s First Ministers in 2001 to foster and accelerate the development and adoption of electronic health record (EHR) systems with compatible standards and communications technologies.

• Continua Health Aliance
• Continua Health Alliance is a non-profit, open industry organization of healthcare and technology companies joining together in collaboration toimprove the quality of personal healthcare.

• Current Procedure Terminology
• The most widely accepted medical nomenclature used to report medical procedures and services under public and private health insurance programs.

• Digital Imaging and Communications In Medicine (1993)
• The DICOM Standard addresses multiple levels of the ISO OSI network model and provides support for the exchange of information on interchange media.

• Health Level 7 (1987)
• Founded in 1987, Health Level Seven International (HL7) is a not-for-profit, ANSI-accredited standards developing organization dedicated to providing a comprehensive framework and related standards for the exchange, integration, sharing, and retrieval of electronic health information that supports clinical practice and the management, delivery and evaluation of health services.

• Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (1998)
• IHE is an initiative by healthcare professionals and industry to improve the way computer systems in healthcare share information. IHE promotes the coordinated use of established standards such as DICOM and HL7 to address specific clinical need in support of optimal patient care.