Four Critical Aspects of eHealth Exchange Content Testing

eHealth Exchange introduced the Content Testing program in February of this year to help solve some of the major health information exchange content hurdles. To accelerate your testing and to ensure you don’t get caught off guard by this process, here are four critical aspects of testing you and your teams should be very familiar with.

#1 – Know what you need to test

Participants in eHealth Exchange must test document sources, document types, and document versions. In your project plan, create activity swimlanes to accommodate the following:

• Testing for at least one sample of document sources such as HIE generated, hospital generated or provider office generated (see below for understanding when you need to test a source document.)
• Testing for at least one document type that supports CCD or Transition of Care
• Testing for at least one supported document version type such as C-32, C-CDA R1.1, C-CDA R2.1.

It is also important for HIEs using third-party, eHealth Exchange certified vendors to verify the vendor’s ability to create and receive documents by submitting the following:

• Testing one of each supported document type such as CCD or Transition of Care.
• Testing for a document version type.

#2 – Know how to plan and budget for testing

The amount of time, energy, and resources will depend on the number of documents you need to test. If you only support the exchange of On-Demand Documents (meaning you parse and then create the document at the point of the query) then your process will likely be less intensive. Your project may only require content testing of 1 document type and 1 document version. However, you still will need to be concerned about the data quality from your sources that can impact the quality of your On-Demand Documents.

However, if your HIE retrieves, or retrieves and stores and then passes along document authored by your data sources, you are using what Zen refers to as Stable Documents. Your content testing will definitely require testing multiple document sources, types and versions.

If you are uncertain if you support On-Demand, Stable, or both types of documents, contact us at 949-396-0361 to schedule a free 15-minute engineering content consultation.

#3 – Know when to test

If you are an existing eHealth Exchange participant (as of February 2018), you must submit a test by February 2019 – no matter what type of documents you are exchanging. Once you start the process, you have 18-months to complete it.

For new exchange participants, you will need to be following the new content testing processes immediately, but you still have 18-months to pass the content testing component.

#4 – Know you don’t have to tackle this alone

If you need to assess your content testing readiness or you are already sending test documents that just won’t pass the test, then we are here to help. Reach out to us at 949-396-0361 to schedule a free 15-minute engineering content consultation online with our engineering service desk team.

Additional resources for HIEs can be found at our resource center including a full presentation slide deck on eHealth Content Testing.