The nationwide effort to enable secure, electronic health information exchange is vibrant and rapidly growing. It can be hard to keep up with the acronyms and abbreviations that naturally arise as different organizations create shorthand designations for concepts and activities that are helping make health information exchange a reality.
To that end, Michigan Health Information Network Shared Services offers this Acronym and Abbreviation Guide to assist in the navigation of this blossoming sector. If you know of more acronyms or abbreviations to include, please let us know at help@mihin.org.
AA: Application (Acknowledgement) Accept HL7 message
ACK: An HL7 acknowledgment message – acknowledgment information identifying the ability of a receiver to accept a message transmitted
ADT: Admission/Discharge/Transfer
AE: Application Exceptions, a non-fatal error of content returned for quality remediation
APCP: Advanced Primary Care Practice
API: Application Programming Interfaces – used to process XML data
AR: Application Rejections or a fatal error; retry
ARRA: American Recovery & Reinvestment Act of 2009
AVR: Automated Voice Response
BCBS-M: Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan
BEACON: Southeast Michigan Beacon Community
BOD: Board of Directors
CAP: College of American Pathology – the leading organization of board-certified pathologists serving patients, pathologists, and the public by fostering and advocating excellence in the practice of pathology and laboratory medicine worldwide.
CCD: Continuity of Care Document – an HL7 architecture of the implementation of CCR (not a competing standard of CCR)
CCR: Continuity of Care Record – a health record standard specification
CCDA: Consolidated Clinical Documentation Architecture – an HL7 XML based markup standard with mandatory textured parts and also optional structural parts that rely on SNOMED and LOINC.
CLIA: Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendment – includes regulation of federal standards of U.S. facilities or sites that test human specimens for health assessment or to diagnose, prevent, or treat disease.
CMS: Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services
COLA: Commission of Laboratory Accreditation – a program established to accredit physician office laboratories, give accreditation to small hospital laboratories, and conducts site reviews.
CQMR: Clinical Quality Measures Record
CTC: Care Team Connect- a technology vendor, a web-based care navigation platform
DQA: Data Quality Analyzer or Assurance
DSP: Display data HL7 message segment
DTMB: Department of Technology, Management & Budget
DURSA: Direct Use and Reciprocal Support Agreement (a framework for exchange)
EDRS: Electronic Death Registry System
EHR: Electronic Health Record
ELR: Electronic Lab result/report
EMR: Electronic Medical Record
EP: Eligible Provider
FIP: Fully in Production
FOC: Full Operating Capability
FTP: File Transfer Protocol
GLBA: Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act – aka – The Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999
GL-HC: Great Lakes Health Connect
GQO: Government Qualified Organization
HAP: Health Alliance Plan of Michigan
HEDIS: Healthcare Effectiveness and Data Information Set – a widely used set of performance measures in the managed care industry.
HIE: Health Information Exchange
HIE-SIM: a simulator program (in PIT) [a placeholder]
HIPAA: Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996
HISP: Healthcare Information Service Provider
HIT: Health Information Technology
HIX: Health Insurance Exchange (Marketplace)
HL7: Health Level Seven, a non-profit organization involved in the development of international healthcare informatics interoperability standards
HPD: Health Provider Directory
ICMP: Internet Control Message Protocol, one of the core protocols of the Internet Protocol Suite this also includes the Simple Network Management Protocol (snmp) which assists with the management of network-connected devices. These messages are typically used for diagnostic or control purposes or generated in response to errors in IP operations; used by the operating systems of networked computers to send error messages indicating that a host or router could not be reached, or to relay a query message. Allows for a ping.
IHE: Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise; a global initiative that drives the adoption of standards to address specific clinical needs (specify precisely how standards are to be used to address needs, eliminating ambiguity)and ensuring a higher level of practical interoperability
Ingenium: Qualified Organization for Southeast Michigan
IOC: Initial Operating Capability
IRP: Incident Response Plan, a step-by-step guide for responding to security (data breach) incidents
ISO: International Organization for Standardization – the organization used to set standards and make the industry more efficient and effective.
ITIL: The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), is a set of practices for IT service management (ITSM) that focuses on aligning IT services with the needs of business. ITIL describes procedures, tasks and checklists that are not organization-specific, used by an organization for establishing a minimum level of competency. It allows the organization to establish a baseline from which it can plan, implement, and measure. It is used to demonstrate compliance and to measure improvement. Businesses can get ITIL training courses from places like itsm.zone.
JCMR: Jackson Community Medical Record
LIS: Laboratory Information Systems – a laboratory management system that offers features that support modern laboratory operations.
LOA: Letter of Authorization
LOINC: Logical Observational Identifiers and Codes- a database for labs
M3 Report: MiHIN Monday Metrics
MAG: Medical Advantage Group
MAV: MiHIN approved Vendor
M-CEITA: Michigan Center for Effective IT Adoption
MCIR: Michigan Care Improvement Registry
MCM: MAG Care Management
MDHHS: Michigan Department of Health and Human Services
MDSS: Michigan Disease Surveillance System
MEA: MiHIN Enterprise Architecture
MEDCIN: a system of standardized medical terminology, is a proprietary medical vocabulary; a point of care terminology intended for use in Electronic Health Record systems.
MIME: Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions – an Internet standard that extends email to support other content types, including non-text attachments.
MiPCT: Michigan Primary Care Transformation Project – the largest of 8 multi-payer Patient-Centered Home pilots in the U.S.
MI*STARR: MHA readmission project to improve quality
MOAC: MiHIN Operations Advisory Committee
MPHI: Michigan Public Health Institute
MPI: Generally MPI stands for Master Patient Index, however in Michigan it stands for Master Person Index because its applications go beyond that of solely healthcare purposes.
MPRO: Michigan’s federally designated Quality Improvement Organization for Medicare
MSA: An HL7 message segment, contains information sent while acknowledging another message
MSP: The Michigan Society of Pathology
MSH: An HL7 message segment, header or routing information
MSSS: Michigan Syndromic Surveillance system
MU: Meaningful Use: Meaningful use is the use of a certified EHR technology for electronic exchange of health information to improve quality of health care. (As of April 2018, Meaningful Use is now called Promoting Interoperability.)
NACK: negative acknowledgment (negative response/error)
NCQA: National Committee for Quality Assurance
NK1: an HL7 message segment, contains information about the patient’s other related parties
NLT: Network Level Testing
NQF: National Quality Forum: promotes change through development and implementation of a national strategy for health care quality measurement and reporting.
NSTIC: National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (a proposal to create secure online identities)
OBX: an HL7 message segment; Observation/Result segment is used to transmit an observation
ONC: Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology
ONC S&I: Standards and Implementation
ORU: Observational Results Unsolicited /Observable Record
PAB: Personal Address Book
PCI DSS: Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard
PCMH: Patient Centered Medical Home
PD1: an HL7 segment that carries additional demographic information
PGIP: Physicians Group Incentive Program (BCBS)
PHI: Protected Health Information
PI: Promoting Interoperability. Promoting Interoperability is the use of a certified EHR technology for electronic exchange of health information to improve quality of healthcare. (As of April 2018, Meaningful Use is now called Promoting Interoperability.)
PID: an HL7 patient identity message; used primarily to communicate patient identification information
PIT: Prototyping and Interoperability Test [the sand box]
POC: Point of Care
PQO: Payor/Plan Qualified Organization
PQRI: Physician Quality Reporting Initiative
PV1: an HL7 patient visit segment, used by registration/patient administration applications to communicate information on a visit-specific basis
PV2: an additional HL7 segment used to give admission reason
QAK: an HL7 query acknowledgment segment
QBP: an HL7 message segment, query by parameter
OBX: an HL7 message segment, Observation
QCK: an HL7 query general acknowledgment segment message
QRD: an HL7 query definition segment
QRDA: Quality Document Reporting Architecture is a Clinical Document Architecture (CDA)-based standard for reporting patient quality data for one or more quality measures. QRDA Category I (QRDA-I): Single-patient Report; QRDA Category II (QRDA-II): Patient List Report; QRDA Category III (ARDA-III): Aggregate/Calculated Report (de-identified).
QO: Qualified Organizations
RBAC: Role Based Access Control
RCMT: Reportable Condition Mapping Table – provides mapping between reportable conditions and their associated LOINC and laboratory tests and SNOMED results.
RCP: an HL7 response control parameter segment, used to restrict the amount of data that should be returned in response to a query
RDF: an HL7 segment which represents a table row definition
ReST: Representational State Transfer – an approach for designing networked applications.
RXA: an HL7 segment, used for pharmacy administration data, a repeating segment; can record unlimited numbers of vaccinations
RXR: an HL7 segment; this pharmacy/treatment route segment contains the alternative combination of route and site
SEMBC: Southeast Michigan Beacon Community
SLA: Service Level Agreement
S/MIME: Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions – an Internet standard for public key encryption and signing of MIME data.
SMTP: Simple Mail Transfer Protocol – is an Internet standard for electronic mail (e-mail) transmission across Internet Protocol (IP) networks.
SNOMED: Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine- a disease classification system
SNOMED-CT: Clinical Terms – collection of medical terminology
SOAP: Simple Object Access Protocol: used to request and receive messages (a web service equivalent to an order; similar in structure to a letter with the message wrapped in an XML envelope)
SOW: Statement of Work
SSH: Secure Shell
Structured Data: Data that resides in fixed fields within a record or file; organized in a structure so that is identifiable and searchable by type; understood by computers and is also efficiently organized for human readers. Structured Query Language (SQL) is an example. A data structure is a way of storing data in a computer so that is can be used efficiently. It is an organization of mathematical and logical concepts of data. [Data in XML files are not fixed in location, they are considered structured because the data are tagged and can be accurately identified.]
TOC: Transitions of Care
UCA: Use case Agreement
UDDI: Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration – used for discovery (a web service equivalent to the yellow pages)
UPHIE: Upper Peninsula Health Information Exchange
VHR: Very High Resolution
VPN: Virtual Private Network; a private communication network often used within a company, or by several companies or organizations, to communicate confidentially over a publicly accessible network
VQO: Virtual Qualified Organizations
VXQ: Vaccination Query for record
VXR: response to a vaccination query
VXU: Unsolicited Vaccination record update
WSDL: Web Services Description Language- used for description (a web service equivalent to a menu)
XCA: Cross QO query
XRD/XDM: IHE standard for supporting XML-based detailed metadata along with SMTP- or SOAP-based transport options.
XDS: Extended Data Service
XML: Extensible Markup Language- defines a set of rules for encoding in a format that is both human readable and machine readable