Better Data. Better Health.
In 2017, leaders within The MITRE Corporation and the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) recognized a fundamental challenge across the oncology field: the lack of a single standard for collecting and sharing a patient's health data electronically. This lack of standardization led to numerous issues, including difficulties in exchanging data, data errors, delays in analyzing data and prescribing treatments, excessive costs for care and research, and an undue burden across the entire health ecosystem.
To address these issues, MITRE and ASCO partnered with a diverse group of leading experts to develop the minimal Common Oncology Data Elements (mCODE): a FHIR-based standard for oncology data collection and sharing. MITRE also worked with Health Level Seven (HL7) to launch the CodeX HL7 FHIR Accelerator: a growing community of providers, patient advocates, researchers, payers, vendors, regulators, and other stakeholders who are driving adoption of mCODE through new standards-based solutions to a range of real-world challenges.
This Health Interoperability Playbook ("the Playbook") consolidates MITRE's experience leading mCODE, CodeX, and similar projects to create a roadmap for specialty champions and their teams to drive new FHIR-based data standards that improve health care and research.
The Playbook is organized around five tracks that form a framework for the CodeX / mCODE approach: Community Building, Use Cases & Planning, Standards Development, Implementation & Testing, and Adoption & Value.
Questions that a new specialty should ask themselves before embarking on the above tracks are included on the Before Starting page.
Design Principles are a foundation for efficient development of quality standards and will help ensure alignment between different standards development initiatives within and across specialty communities.
A downloadable Playbook Checklist will help specialty communities embark on new standards initiatives across Playbook tracks.
Case Studies show how specific projects have leveraged the tracks. Additional details related to the tracks and Case Studies can be found in the Resources section.
