Level of completeness of the data elements

The PACIO (Post-Acute Care Interoperability) Project, established February 2019, is a collaborative effort between industry, government, and other stakeholders, with the goal of establishing a framework for the development of FHIR implementation guides to facilitate health information exchange.

Overall, the PACIO community applauds ONC for addressing gaps that exist in the current USCDI but has concerns that the data elements seem disproportionately focused on acute care use cases. PACIO encourages ONC to consider inclusion of more data elements relevant to Post-Acute Care (PAC) settings, especially those capturing information about functional status, cognitive status, and communication. Specifically, PACIO recommends including a Screening for Depression and Follow-up Plan data element to support Universal Measure Foundation 672. PACIO further recommends ONC consider adding two additional data elements, Cognition Performance and Communication Performance, under the Health Status Assessments data class.