Charter

Meaningful Use Stage 1 and foreseen Stage 2 requires information to be exchanged in transition of care. Implementers are often confused on how to use the specifications to exchange the required data. The exchange of clinical summaries is hampered by ambiguous common definitions of what data elements must at a minimum be exchanged, how they must be encoded, and how those common semantic elements map to MU specified formats (C32/CCD and CCR). Finally, the lack of a robust toolset to aid in development and validation of conformant templated clinical documents is a major impediment to the widespread adoption of the standards.

Purpose and Goals

The mission of the Transitions of Care Initiative is to improve the exchange of core clinical information among providers, patients and other authorized entities electronically in support of meaningful use and IOM-identified needs for improvement in the quality of care.The initiative supports national health initiatives, key healthcare stakeholders and healthcare priorities and is driven by one compelling question: "What if every care transition was enabled by an unambiguously-defined core set of high-quality clinical data?" The Transitions of Care Initiative seeks to support Meaningful Use Stage 1 that specifies the exchange of key clinical information among providers of care and with patients and other authorized entities electronically based on level of system capability, i.e., human readable, unstructured text or full interoperable structured data. The Initiative is coordinated by John Feikema, as of June 2012, with guidance from the Office of Interoperability and Standards.