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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 The "preferred" designation is important to promote reuse of existing content in SDP-V to create efficiency in public health surveillance. This selection of “preferred” content is generally the outcome of a data 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.
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- Program subject matter experts and surveillance practitioners (e.g., epidemiologists, public health scientists) from across surveillance programs and domains (e.g., infectious disease surveillance, chronic disease surveillance, laboratory surveillance, emergency preparedness, vital statistics, etc.) to identify barriers to standards adoption and articulate:
- how How data standards are currently used in their area of practice
- the The impact of standards adoption
- the usefulness of standards-related shared resources and tools available
- the The need and proposed business value of SMaHSC activities
- Public Health data standards management practitioners across CDC (e.g., informaticist, vocabularist, terminologist) that who 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.
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SDP Vocabulary Service
The SDP Vocabulary Service provides a repository of questions, response sets, 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 SDP 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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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 SDP 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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- Preferred – Content that has been selected as CDC’s first choice to express a concept
- Similar To – Content that is similar in meaning to another selected piece of content
- Do not use – Content that is outdated and that CDC does not consider appropriate for data collection instruments
Detailed descriptions and the goals of these terms are provided in the table below.
SDP-V Label | Proposed definition | Goal |
Preferred | Surveys, sections, questions, data elements, or response sets that have been formally approved by SMaHSC or another CDC authority as the chosen and vetted characterization of a concept within SDP-V | User can easily find and reuse with reduced review time |
Similar To | Degrees or alternatives or synonyms of content | User can review options that are alike in meaning |
Do not use | Content that should not be used | User generally will not use |
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There are at least four pathways that SMaHSC might receive proposals to consider content in the SDP Vocabulary Service for “preferred” status:
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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 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 thoughts on the proposal 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 designation of "preferred", 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 a SMaHSC "preferred" proposal is pictured below.
Sample “Preferred” Content Proposal Form
Proposal Review
SMaHSC will solicit each stakeholder’s approval for adding the tag “preferred” to the identified SDP Vocabulary Service content and will document it along with comments on the form as part of the proposal review process.
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SMaHSC voting members will decide to approve or deny the proposed change, voting in accordance with the SMaHSC charter. The charter states: “Decisions shall be reached by achieving a simple majority of Voting Members voting members present at a meeting. In the event of a tie vote, the Co-Chairs will have the deciding vote, or may call for a re-vote after further discussion by the Committee.” The decision will be documented on the form, which will become part of the committee’s working files.
Per the reference to further discussion in the charter, SMaHSC may choose to send the proposal back to the submitter and the stakeholders that disagree and ; SMaHSC may ask them to recommend options that all of them can agree on. SMaHSC will consider these options and decide if they can accept one of them.
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The decision will be documented and publicized, and SMaHSC will formally advise the SDP Vocabulary Service curator to mark the content as “preferred”.
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The figure below displays in the first two swim lanes the general “preferred” governance process and in the next three swim lanes details the subsequent steps to implement and publicize the content change among users of the SDP Vocabulary Service. The general "preferred" governance process involves a CDC program user or submitter and SMaHSC and is described in more detail in previous sections.
The implementation process involves three user roles (designated with an asterisk in the figure) within the SDP-V Service: the administration/curator, publishers and authors. Once SMaHSC accepts the "preferred" proposal, the first step for implementation 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.
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 program publishers of the harmonization opportunity.
The program publishers promote the "preferred" content for author this use if content is under current development or during the next tool revision cycle for that data collection instruction. 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.
In some cases an older or different piece of content must be used in a data collection instrument. When that happens, the author files a business justification with the publisher to explain the continued use of nonpreferred non-preferred content.
SDP Vocabulary Service “Preferred” Implementation Workflow
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