This documentation describes a proposed governance process for the designation of "preferred" content in the Surveillance Data Platform Vocabulary Service (SDP-V, or the SDP Vocabulary Service). 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.
The Surveillance Data Standards Management and Harmonization Steering Committee (SMaHSC) is proposed to be a CDC-wide governance body 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, promote best practices, 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 jurisdiction that authorizes the use of “preferred” in the SDP Vocabulary Service. In doing so, SMaHSC will observe the basic tenets of good governance, which are participatory, consensus-oriented, accountable, transparent, responsive, effective and efficient, equitable, and inclusive.
A methodical approach to marking content in the SDP Vocabulary Service as “preferred”, such as the one described here, will ensure that the SMaHSC:
This high-level proposed process applies to the content of the SDP Vocabulary Service.
This process is meant to be used as a starting point by SMaHSC or its equivalent, when such a governance body is established.
This documentation is based on the following assumptions:
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 SMaHSC are as follows:
To achieve its goals and objectives, SMaHSC will:
SMaHSC membership will represent a broad range of CDC expertise, perspectives, and familiarity with public health surveillance data needs, initiatives, and priorities of external stakeholders including surveillance partners (e.g., State, Tribal, Local, and Territorial (STLT) partners, CSTE, APHL), standards development organizations (SDOs) (e.g., SNOMED, LOINC), and other government agencies (e.g., Office of Management and Budget, Office of the National Coordinator).
Voting membership will have knowledge, skills, and experience from at least one of the groups described below:
This proposed process supports #5 in the responsibilities listed above.
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 SDP 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 STLT partner reporting burden, as well as drive towards harmonization in data collection instruments.
Content that can be marked as “preferred” in the SDP Vocabulary Service includes questions, response sets, sections (groupings of questions) or SDP-V surveys (grouping of sections). "Preferred" content in the SDP Vocabulary Service is selected through an established process as the way CDC wants 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.
The SDP 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.
The SDP-V service has the capability to designate content to assist with reuse and harmonization. The SDP-V users identified the need to designate content as "preferred", which is content that has been selected as CDC’s first choice within SDP-V to express a concept. This data harmonization term can be implemented when the curator role for the SDP-V Service is staffed. The goal of using this label is greater data harmonization.
The detailed description and the goal of "Preferred" is 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 |
The label “Preferred” is presently available in SDP-V. The governance process presented here addresses the "preferred" label and can easily be used for additional harmonization terms that may be developed in the future in the SDP Vocabulary Service.
We describe a process created specifically for SMaHSC. Other processes might be better suited for other authorities.
There are at least four pathways by which SMaHSC might receive proposals to consider conferring "preferred" status on content in the SDP Vocabulary Service:
By whatever pathway a proposal reaches SMaHSC, the approach to evaluate the proposal will be the same. An overview of the input and outputs of the process is displayed below. A proposal to designate content as "preferred" in SDP-V is required as an input, which is then reviewed and evaluated by SMaHSC. The output of the process is the decision from SMaHSC.
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.
Every proposal to designate content in the SDP Vocabulary Service as “preferred” will be submitted to SMaHSC on a standard form.
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 following:
The completed standard form 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.
The SMaHSC "preferred" coordinator will solicit each stakeholder’s approval for adding the tag “preferred” to the identified SDP Vocabulary Service content and will document it along with stakeholder comments on the form as part of the proposal review process.
The proposal with stakeholder feedback will be distributed to the members of SMaHSC, who may invite other stakeholders to provide input on the request. The proposal will be added to the next meeting agenda for discussion and voting.
SMaHSC voting members will decide to approve or deny the proposed designation, voting in accordance with the SMaHSC charter. The charter states: “Decisions shall be reached by achieving a simple majority of 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.
SMaHSC may choose to send the proposal back to the submitter and the stakeholders that disagree; SMaHSC may ask them to recommend options that all can agree on. SMaHSC will consider these options and decide if they can accept one of them.
In most cases, however, the stakeholders will have been part of the harmonization effort and are being asked to approve their own recommendation.
The decision will be documented and publicized, and SMaHSC will formally advise the SDP Vocabulary Service curator to mark the content as “preferred”.
Once SMaHSC decides content in SDP-V should be marked "preferred", then the designation must be implemented in the SDP Vocabulary Service. An overview of the inputs and outputs of the process is displayed below. A decision from SMaHSC to designate content as "preferred" in SDP-V is required as an input, which is then marked and promoted by the SDP-V administrator or curator. The output of the process is the designated "Preferred" content in SDP-V.
The following roles have been provisionally identified as part of this implementation process. Other roles may be determined as the process is implemented and improved upon. See the SDP-V Users Manual for more information on each of these roles.
The figure below displays the implementation workflow for "preferred" designation of content in SDP-V. It includes the general “preferred” governance process in the first two swim lanes as discussed in more detail in previous sections. This section focuses on the the next three swim lanes, which describe the the subsequent steps to implement and publicize the "preferred" designation in SDP-V.
The implementation process involves three user roles (designated with an asterisk in the figure) within the SDP Vocabulary Service: the administrator/curator, publishers, and authors. Once SMaHSC votes on and approves the "preferred" designation, the first step is for the curator to identify the content in the SDP Vocabulary Service. If the content has not been created, it is developed and added to the service. Once the content is in the service, it is marked “preferred” by the curator. 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, who includes it in the next update of the tool. Adding this information to the SDP Vocabulary Service will highlight the designation 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 currently under development. Authors assess the content and incorporate it into their data collection instruments 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 provides a business justification to the publisher to explain the continued use of non-preferred content.
