Content Development
Relationship with or access to an authoritative clinically-focused organization whose job, in part, is to develop and promulgate clinical guidance, one form of which could be Clinical Practice Guidelines.
This organization is not only the source of CPGs, but it is also the source of Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) that were involved in the creation/curation of the CPG and can be available for clarification, review and validation of authoring artifacts created based on the CPG.
Examples of such organizations are
● specialty colleges (ACEP, ACOEM, ACS, etc.) or organizations (AAFP, etc.),
● government organizations (DoD/VA CPG working group; VA/VHA/Assistant Deputy Under Secretary for Health for Quality, Safety, and Value; DoD/DHA Clinical Communities; etc.),
● academic institutions,
● for-profit and not-for-profit health systems (Intermountain Healthcare, Mayo Clinic),
● in-house clinical staff (if the organization considering doing authoring is a health system itself).
Stages of Development
Process design
Specification of tasks
Documentation
Data mapping
Coding schema (SNOMED, LOINC, RxNorm/RxNav)
System integration with interface with EHR
Documentation of Physician Control
control tasks in models that require physician input to accept or reject a recommendation
Authoring Hints
Avoid FEEL characters and leading numbers when naming data items.
If a BPMN model has two or more DMN models that use the same name for a data item, then the system will try to combine the data items into one.
Linking to Pubmed for references: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/number
Linking to Youtube video (under the share button)
Tooling
Examples of software tooling that authors would use to document shareable clinical pathways. This list would give the reader a starting point from which they can do further research. Need to be careful that the list is not perceived as an endorsement of any particular product, but there could be some advice about useful capabilities to look for…helping the reader learn which capabilities are essential vs. nice-to-have vs. unnecessary/redundant.
Importance of not getting locked into one software vendor. Software built using a vendor who complies with the OMG/HL7 standards should be able to run on the software of any other vendor.
Modeling Expertise
This section should give the reader an idea of what skill sets and experience a good modeler/author should have. The content of this section could be an abstract from a well-written position description (for hiring a modeler) or statement of work (for outsourcing/contracting a modeler).
Organizations considering starting or improving their authoring “business” will need to make decisions about how they will acquire modeling expertise. Will they hire? Will they outsource? Will they grow from within by training new skills? They will need help making these “buy vs. build” decisions. They will need help knowing what pitfalls to watch out for when deciding to hire/outsource/train. Examples of salary ranges based on experience and expertise.
Domain-specific expertise (healthcare) vs. generalist…Is it more important to get a GREAT modeler who does not have healthcare domain experience or get a MEDIOCRE modeler with LOTS of healthcare domain experience. Obviously, it is best to get a GREAT modeler with LOTS of healthcare domain experience, but those might be hard to find or VERY expensive. Give examples of appropriate/meaningful certifications as well as bogus certifications to watch out for because they don’t offer any assurance of competence.