Purpose of Detailed Clinical Models (DCM)

Detailed Clinical Models (DCM) prescribe a static model-of-meaning specification for clinical content within the context of SAIF. Detailed Clinical Models are intended for computable semantic interoperability between and within (including longitudinally) clinical information systems as the level of detail which is clinically relevant. Interpretation of DCMs is context independent: meaning is represented in a fashion which is agnostic to source system or intended use. Ambiguity in implementation is avoided, while clinical ambiguity is clearly represented, and clinical context provided in a systematic fashion. They are intended to meet the requirements of a virtual medical record (vMR) for clinical decision support; to enable massive-scale analytics (effectively eliminating the ambiguity and uncertainty associated with assimilating data from multiple sources) required for a “learning healthcare system”; to promote quality measure reporting; to improve the quality of HL7 standards; to reduce the complexity needed to create modern, sophisticated electronic health record systems (EHRS), personal health record systems (PHRS) and clinical trial management systems (CTMS) with electronic data capture (EDC); to enable creation of a component-oriented approach to EHRS where a single GUI could inter-operate with any number of 3rd party systems; and to provide rich, context dependent information for public health disease surveillance and outbreak detection. HL7 DCMs are intended to supply the clinical content specifications for HL7 v3 messages, HL7 v3 CDA r3 (CDA r2 has too many limitations in the “body” to support the semantics required), and HL7 v3 based web services. Other serializations could include class libraries, implementation guides, UML class diagrams.