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This 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 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 are participatory, consensus-oriented, accountable, transparent, responsive, effective and efficient, equitable and inclusive.
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- Identify and support priority areas for standards management and harmonization.
- Establish a communication mechanism, which is understandable and accessible by both surveillance practitioners and public health informaticists, in order to improve understanding of surveillance data standards management and harmonization activities.
- Integrate CDC’s strategic priorities on managing surveillance standards and harmonizing surveillance data by facilitating collaboration and coordination for surveillance practitioners and public health informaticists.
- Promote shared resources and educational opportunities on standards.
- Encourage data harmonization through vocabulary repositories, such as reviewing content in the SDP Vocabulary Service to promote reuse.
- Initiate cross-program working groups to increase understanding and solve challenges regarding standards management and harmonization.
- Report to the Surveillance Leadership Board on progress and challenges and make recommendations on standards and harmonization priorities, as well as other steering committee activities.
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), Standards standards development organizations (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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The Vocabulary Service provides a repository of questions, 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.
Content that can be marked as “preferred” in the Vocabulary Service includes includes questions, response sets, questions, sections (groupings of questions) or SDP-V surveys (grouping of sections). "Preferred" content in the Vocabulary Service is selected through an established process as the way CDC prefers to collect data for a particular concept. Designating content as "preferred" helps to standardize surveys and other data collection efforts, which reduces the response burden of CDC partners and simplifies data collection, analysis, and reporting.
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However a proposal reaches SMaHSC, the approach to evaluate it will be the same. An overview of the input and outputs of the process are displayed in the picture below. A proposal for "preferred" in SDP-V is needed as an input, which is then used for the governance process for SMaHSC to review and evaluated. Then the output of the process is a decision from the SMaHSC. 
Roles and Responsibilities
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- 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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The standard form will explain why the content should be flagged preferred. Supporting artifacts such as a harmonization work group report might be included. Artifacts should include the business case for the preferred standard, the problem it solves, and the proposed SDP-V specification. It will list all known key stakeholders who will be affected by the change. It is likely that the key stakeholders were part of the harmonization work group that made the recommendation to begin with. It may include programs, individuals, systems, or documents. Forms lacking a mandatory field will be returned to the proposer. An sample form for the a SDP-V SMaHSC "preferred" proposal is pictured below.
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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.
Additional harmonization opportunities are identified by the administrator or curator, who searches the SDP Vocabulary Service for content similar to the newly designated "preferred" content. If similar content is located, the administrator or curator notifies the Program Publishers of the harmonization opportunity.
The program publishers promote the "preferred" content during the next tool revision cycle. They encourage authors to review the content for potential applicability to the data collection instruments they are currently developing. Authors assess the content and incorporate it into their development projects where it fits.
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