Acronym and Abbreviation Guide

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