NIH Issues Notice Encouraging Researchers to Adopt U.S. Core Data for Interoperability Standard

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently released a guide notice (NOT-OD-20-146) encouraging NIH-supported clinical programs and researchers to adopt and use the standardized set of healthcare data classes, data elements, and associated vocabulary standards in the U.S. Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI) standard. Use of this standard will enable greater interoperable exchange of health information for clinical care and research.

The USCDI establishes a standardized set of data classes and component data elements, expands on data long required to be supported by certified electronic health record systems (EHRs), and incorporates health data standards developed and supported by the National Library of Medicine (NLM). The standard will benefit NIH researchers through increased availability of consistently standardized clinical data for research and will make it easier to aggregate research data sets and enable greater discovery. USCDI adoption will allow care delivery and research organizations to use the same coding systems for key data elements that are part of the USCDI data classes.

These efforts will complement use of the HL7^® Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources^® (FHIR^®) standard, which NIH encouraged researchers to use in a guide notice issued a year ago to facilitate researcher access to clinical data in EHRs and to facilitate the sharing of research data. They also advance goals of the NIH Strategic Plan for Data Science and NLM’s new strategic plan to generate and leverage vast amounts of data and to ensure those data are findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable – or aligned with the FAIR principles.

Learn more in an Open Mike blog post titled "Leveraging Standardized Clinical Data to Advance Discovery."

Read more about NIH's FHIR initiatives.