July 24, 2019
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Introduction
This document was developed by the Health Federally Funded Research and Development Center, operated by The MITRE Corporation (MITRE), in partnership with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Center for Surveillance, Epidemiology, and Laboratory Services. It describes a proposed governance process for the designation of preferred content in the Surveillance Data Platform Vocabulary Service (SDP-V) Vocabulary Service . This selection of “preferred” content is generally the outcome of a harmonization effort that sought to simplify and streamline the choices of terminology to express a concept. It is expected that a clear and understandable process will ensure that the meaning of “preferred” is recognized and trusted by stakeholders.
The Surveillance Data Standards Management and Harmonization Steering Committee (SMaHSC) is planned to be a CDC-wide governance group that promotes collaboration and coordination across CDC’s surveillance data standards and data harmonization practitioners to help CDC achieve its vision for Public Health Surveillance in the 21st century. The purpose of SMaHSC is to increase the visibility of public health surveillance data standards management and harmonization activities across CDC, identify challenges, and prioritize opportunities for surveillance data harmonization and standards adoption. The SMaHSC will serve as an authoritative body for cross-program surveillance standards management, implementation, and data harmonization by providing strategic oversight and advocating for initiatives that will impact standards use, adoption, effectiveness, and data harmonization practices that are mutually valuable across program areas. SMaHSC will serve as the decision-making authority that authorizes the use of “preferred” in the Vocabulary Service. In doing so, SMaHSC will observe the basic tenets of good governance, which is participatory, consensus oriented, accountable, transparent, responsive, effective and efficient, equitable and inclusive.
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Purpose
A methodical approach to marking content in the Vocabulary Service as “preferred”, such as the one described here, will ensure that the SMaHSC:
- Considers prospective changes to the Vocabulary Service content from a technical and a business perspective.
- Consults all key stakeholders so that they have a voice in the final decision.
- Documents and publicizes decisions.
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Scope
This high-level proposed process applies to the content of the SDP Vocabulary Service.
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Audience
This process is meant to be used as a starting point by the Standards Management and Harmonization Steering Committee (SMaHSC) or its equivalent, when such an organization is established.
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Assumptions
This document is based on the following assumptions:
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- A governance group to oversee harmonization activities CDC-wide will be established.
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Background
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SMaHSC
SMaHSC when established will support CDC’s mission to protect the public’s health and will align to the Public Health Surveillance Strategy. The goals of the SMaHSC are as follows:
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This draft process supports #5 in the responsibilities listed above.
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SDP Vocabulary Service
The Vocabulary Service[1] provides a repository of Response Sets, Questions, and groupings of questions (called Sections and SDP-V Surveys) that allow public health professionals to more rapidly discover, reuse or create, and deploy data collection instruments. The Vocabulary Service also provides transparency across published content from multiple programs and enables use of harmonized Questions and Response Sets. The goal of the Vocabulary Service is to facilitate discovery and reuse of existing vocabulary content, thereby reducing the number of different ways the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) asks for the same type of information across programs and surveillance systems. This will help to reduce state, tribal, local, and territorial (STLT) partner reporting burden, as well as drive towards harmonization in data collection instruments.
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The Vocabulary Service includes an attribute that can be toggled to identify any content in the service as “preferred”; search results are sorted by the “preferred” attribute so that such content is displayed at the top of a user’s search results to promote use.
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Data Harmonization Terminology in the Vocabulary Service
When the curator role for the Vocabulary Service is staffed and the necessary development has been completed in the Vocabulary Service, SDP-V content may be identified in three possible ways. The Health FFRDC team collaborated with SDP-V users to identify the need for three data harmonization terms in the service. The goal of using these labels is greater data harmonization.
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The label “Preferred” is available in SDP-V. The other terms will require further development. The governance process addresses the first label and can easily be used for the other two.
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“Preferred” Content Governance Process
We describe a process suited to SMaHSC. For other authorities, and other time scales, other processes might be better.
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However a proposal reaches SMaHSC, the approach to evaluate it will be the same.
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Roles and Responsibilities
The following roles have been provisionally identified as part of this process. Other roles may be determined as the process is implemented and improved upon.
- Curator of the SDP Vocabulary Service: This person is envisioned as an authoritative overseer of content in the Vocabulary Service, identifying informal consensus on specific content as well as synonymous content. The curator will be responsible for tagging content as “preferred”.
- SMaHSC Coordinator for preferred review: This person will review the standard form that proposes content as preferred and ensures that it is complete. This person may also poll stakeholders as to their preferences or may delegate the task. He or she will then forward the completed proposal with stakeholder comments to the SMaHSC membership for their action.
- SMaHSC Members: The members of SMaHSC will be identified as described in the charter for the group. The charter also describes the voting process.
- Stakeholders: Stakeholders are specific to each proposal as users of the SDP-V content under consideration. They will likely have already participated in the harmonization activity that resulted in the recommendation of preferred.
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Standard Form for Proposing “Preferred” Content
Every proposal to designate content in the Vocabulary Service as “preferred” will be submitted to SMaHSC on a standard form. See Appendix A for a sample.
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Forms lacking a mandatory field will be returned to the proposer.
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Proposal Review
SMaHSC will solicit each stakeholder’s approval for adding the tag “preferred” to the identified Vocabulary Service content and will document it along with comments on the form as part of the proposal process.
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SMaHSC Evaluation
The proposal with stakeholder feedback will be distributed to the members of SMaHSC, who may invite other stakeholders to provide input on the change.
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The decision will be documented and publicized, and SMaHSC will formally advise the Vocabulary Service curator to mark the content as “preferred”.
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“Preferred” Content Implementation
Appendix B displays the “preferred” governance process and the subsequent steps to implement and publicize the content change among users of the SDP Vocabulary Service.
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