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Health Information Architecture, Modeling, and Enterprise Architecture Planning

Specification Purpose and Scope

Purpose

The purpose of the Standard Health Data Architecture is to provide a model-based common database design that healthcare system planners, architects, and developers can readily use to construct systems. This design approach is specifically intended to work with standard healthcare messages and the growing body of electronic patient record standards to promote interoperability among disparate healthcare systems.

The ANSI/ADA 1000 Specification and Implementation Guide provide architectural blueprint and technical guidance that system developers can use to prepare a clinical information system, database, or clinical component of a larger healthcare information system.

Scope of Application

This Specification and Implementation Guide provide the models, metadata, and information needed by system developers to efficiently and economically build clinical databases and data systems. The scope of application for this Specification is explicitly limited to the data tier of clinical information systems.

This Specification and implementation guide addresses relational data structures and the persistent data of object-oriented structures, especially as used by conventional client-server and Web-enabled system implementations. Such implementations are typically built as a tiered system architecture where the data subsystem (database server) is loosely coupled to the application and/or presentation system tiers.

This Specification does not address clinical data at the presentation layer, as for electronic health records, and it does not address clinical data in messages or distribution of clinical data via the Internet. While portions of this Specification are applicable to administrative and management functions directly supporting clinical information, this Specification is not intended to be the sole reference for applications that are exclusively health management and administration oriented, such as claims administration.

The Specification can support both transactional and analytical implementations serving human and veterinary medicine, dentistry, nursing, pharmacy, public health, clinical laboratory, and allied health professions and services.