Standards
Standards provides information about the current and emerging technology standards related to healthcare education and links to important articles and documents detailing these standards.
Information Technology Standards for Healthcare Education
HEALTHCARE LOM
Healthcare LOM is a draft standard that customizes IEEE's Learning Object Metadata to address the needs of healthcare educators and learners. This draft standard provides a consistent way of describing healthcare learning objects. This customization of the LOM standard involves adding elements that are critical to healthcare education, including credit information, off-label use disclosure, conflict of interest disclosure, and level of medical evidence. Healthcare LOM also customizes the vocabularies for some of the generic metadata elements, including classification and educational context.
Organization Responsible: MedBiquitous Consortium
Specifications: http://www.medbiq.org/working_groups/education/HealthcareLOMSpecification_01.pdf
Primers: Under development
Best Practices/Guidelines: Under development
SCORM for Healthcare
Scorm for Healthcare is a draft standard that customizes the Learning Object Metadata within SCORM to address the needs of healthcare educators and learners.
This draft standard provides a consistent way of describing healthcare learning objects. This customization of the LOM standard used by SCORM involves adding elements that are critical to healthcare education, including credit information, off-label use disclosure, conflict of interest disclosure, and level of medical evidence. Healthcare LOM also customizes the vocabularies for some of the generic metadata elements, including classification and educational context.
Organization Responsible: MedBiquitous Consortium
Specifications:
http://www.medbiq.org/working_groups/education/MEDBIQ-SCORMSpecification_05.pdf
Primers: Under development
Best Practices/Guidelines: Under development
MEDICAL EDUCATION METRICS (MEMS)
The MedBiquitous Medical Education Working Group is creating a specification for a common language for exchanging metrics information that will enable education providers and supporters to better measure the reach and effectiveness of their programs.
Organization Responsible: MedBiquitous Consortium
Specifications:
http://www.medbiq.org/working_groups/education/MEMSSpecification_03.pdf
Primers: Under development
Best Practices/Guidelines: Under development
Information Technology Standards in Education
SCORM
Developed by the US Department of Defense's Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative (ADL), SCORM is acknowledged as the model for online education. SCORM is a suite of standards for online education that enables interoperability of learning content with multiple LMSs. SCORM implements a modular approach to online learning that aggregates discrete units of digital instruction.
Organization Responsible: Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative
Specifications: http://www.adlnet.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=SCORMDown
Primers:
Guidelines and Best Practices: Best Practices Guide for Content Developers (PDF format) (LSAL)
Learning Object Metadata (LOM)
Information about a learning object that allows that learning object to be identified, managed, located, and evaluated. The standard that specifies the syntax and semantics of learning object metadata is maintained by the IEEE.
Organization Responsible: IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee
Specification: http://ltsc.ieee.org/wg12/20020612-Final-LOM-Draft.html
Primers:
Content Object Repository Discovery and Registration/Resolution Architecture (CORDRA)
CORDRA is an open, standards-based model for how to design and implement software systems for the purposes of discovery, sharing and reuse of learning content through the establishment of interoperable federations of learning content repositories.
Source: CORDRA Website
More Information: CORDRA Website
Content Packaging Specification
Facilitates interchange of content between different learning systems by providing a way to package learning information and metadata.
Source:
IMS Global Learning Consortium
Organization Responsible: IMS Global Learning Consortium
Specification: http://www.imsglobal.org/content/packaging/index.cfm
Guidelines and Best Practices: IMS Content Packaging Best Practice Guide
Simple Sequencing Specification
Defines a method for sequencing discrete learning activities using rules that describe the branching or flow of instruction according to the outcomes of a learner's interactions with content.
Source: IMS Global Learning Consortium
Organization Responsible: IMS Global Learning Consortium
Specification: http://www.imsglobal.org/content/packaging/index.cfm
Guidelines and Best Practices: IMS Simple Sequencing Best Practice and Implementation Guide
Related Standards and Standards Organizations
CCOW
Aimed at facilitating the integration of applications at the point of use, CCOW is an end-user-focused standard that complements HL7's traditional emphasis on data interchange and enterprise workflow. Using a technique known as context management, the clinical user's experience is one of interacting with a single system, when in fact he or she may be using multiple, independent applications from many different systems, each via its native user interface.
By synchronizing and coordinating applications so that they automatically follow the user's context, the CCOW Standard serves as the basis for ensuring secure and consistent access to patient information from heterogeneous sources. The benefits include applications that are easier to use, increased utilization of electronically available information, and an increase in patient safety. Further, CCOW support for secure context management provides a healthcare standards basis for addressing HIPAA requirements. For example, CCOW enables the deployment of highly secure single sign-on solutions.
Source: Health Level Seven (HL7)
More Information: Health Level Seven (HL7)
Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI)
Develops metadata standards including the Dublin Core metadata element set, which is a standard for cross-domain information resource description.
Source: Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
More Information: Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
Health Level Seven (HL7)
Provides standards for the exchange, management and integration of data that support clinical patient care and the management, delivery and evaluation of healthcare services. Of particular relevance to healthcare e-learning are HL7's CCOW and Infobutton standards.
Source: Health Level Seven (HL7)
More Information: Health Level Seven (HL7)
IMS Global Learning Consortium
An organization that develops and promotes the adoption of open technical specifications for interoperable learning technology. Several IMS specifications have become worldwide de facto standards for delivering learning products and services.
Source: IMS Global Learning Consortium
More information: IMS Global Learning Consortium
Infobutton Standard
An infobutton is a point-of-care information retrieval application that automatically generates and sends queries to electronic health information resources (e-resources) using patient data extracted from the electronic medical record.
Source: Health Level Seven (HL7)
More Information: Health Level Seven (HL7)
SNOMED Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT)
SNOMED Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT) is a dynamic, scientifically validated clinical health care terminology and infrastructure. The SNOMED CT Core terminology provides a common language that enables a consistent way of capturing, sharing and aggregating health data across specialties and sites of care. Among the applications for SNOMED CT are electronic medical records, ICU monitoring, clinical decision support, medical research studies, clinical trials, computerized physician order entry, disease surveillance, image indexing and consumer health information services.
The SNOMED CT Core terminology contains over 361,800 health care concepts with unique meanings and formal logic-based definitions organized into hierarchies. As of January 2004, the fully populated table with unique descriptions for each concept contains more than 975,000 descriptions. Approximately 1.47 million semantic relationships exist to enable reliability and consistency of data retrieval.
Source: SNOMED CT
More Information: SNOMED CT
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential.
Source: World Wide Web Consortium
More Information: World Wide Web Consortium
