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 documentation describes a proposed governance process for the designation of preferred content in the Surveillance Data Platform Vocabulary Service (SDP-V). 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 proposed 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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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.

Assumptions

This document documentation is based on the following assumptions:

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SMaHSC membership will represent a broad range of CDC expertise and perspectives and familiarity with the public health surveillance data needs, initiatives, and priorities of external stakeholders including surveillance partners (e.g., State, Tribal, Local, and Territorial partners, CSTE, APHL), SDOs (e.g., SNOMED, LOINC) and other government agencies (e.g., Office of Management and Budget, Office of the National Coordinator).

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• Public Health data standards management practitioners across CDC (e.g., informaticist, vocabularist, terminologist) that are knowledgeable of vocabularies, data exchange specifications, SDO activities and repositories, and standards development processes. Members should represent diverse standards management perspectives from different domains, including infectious disease, non-infectious disease, laboratory data exchange, vital statistics, emergency preparedness, and research.

This draft proposed process supports #5 in the responsibilities listed above.

SDP Vocabulary Service

The Vocabulary Service[1] provides Service 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 figure below displays the general “preferred” governance process and details the subsequent steps to implement and publicize the content change among users of the SDP Vocabulary Service.

The first step is to identify the content in the SDP Vocabulary Service. If the content has not been created, it is developed at this point and added to the service. Once the content is located in the service, it is marked “preferred” by the service administrator or curator, when that position is created.

The administrator or curator submits information on the newly tagged preferred content for the “What’s New” tab in the SDP-Vocabulary Service to the SDP-V Development Team. Adding this information to the service will highlight the change to users.

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