Standard Charter Organization
The Standards Charter Organization
The Standard Charter Organization (SCO) was created with the goal of bringing together leaders in the U.S. healthcare standards development community in order to address the barriers of communication between varied healthcare providers. Currently, there are many different standards for electronic health information among many different organizations. Any significant data exchange involves the implementation of multiple standards, sometimes requiring the use of multiple standards simultaneously. This poses significant challenges to automating the flow of healthcare data.
The varied standards development organizations (SDO) within the health information sphere use different data types and elements, syntaxes, and vocabularies in response to different stakeholder groups and needs. These differing standards are created based on different world views and are explained by using different styles of documentation and sometimes employing overlapping scopes.
The significant challenge of developing and implementing interoperable information systems delays the health information systems that can improve healthcare-cost effectiveness and patient safety and facilitate research, public health surveillance, and intervention. Due to the increased level of effort demanded from the largely volunteer workforce in standards development, interoperable information standards require more time to develop, test, and implement.
The lack of funding and commitment, from both the private and public sectors, has resulted in a failure to create a broad solution to the problems of inconsistency among information products. Initiatives that are more narrowly focused, such as e-prescribing, have achieved greater success with increased resources and commitment. Multiple collaborations between SDOs involved with health information, including those chosen for the Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel, are working towards improving interoperability. This further increases demand on the limited resources available.
The mission of the SCO is to facilitate the effective coordination and collaboration on U.S. national healthcare information standards development for enhanced interoperability among diverse SDOs. Working in the areas of health data acquisition, processing, and handling systems, the objective is to provide healthcare technology users the ability to share information accurately.