No uncertain terms

Mary Stevens, Editor

The Center for Plain Language dares to dream … and legislate. This week, the group lauded the U.S. Senate for passing the Plain Writing Act of 2010. The bill requires the federal government to write documents, such as tax returns, federal college aid applications and Veterans Administration forms in simple language. The Act passed the U.S. House of Representatives in March; the amended Senate bill now goes back to the House for final approval. 

Imagine what would happen if plain writing requirements were extended to include federal healthcare initiatives. Would this result in smaller documents and fewer FAQs down the line? Alas, at present, the need for clarifications will continue.

Just agreeing on common language is a huge undertaking, and there was some interesting news on that front earlier in the week. Kaiser Permanente announced the donation of its Convergent Medical Terminology (CMT) translation-enabling technology for U.S. distribution through the HHS and international distribution through the International Healthcare Terminology Standards Development Organisation. The goal is to develop structured health data and generate the standardized data necessary to support better care through quality assessment, speedy exchange of data and public health surveillance, among other things.

Natural language processing (NLP) capabilities, including translation of words into code, are fundamental to interoperability and are part of a couple of recent business developments. These include Ingenix’s recent buy of A-Life, and its LifeCode NLP technology that reads clinical documentation, deciphers the meaning and context of words contained in medical records, identifies diagnoses and procedures, then recommends appropriate codes.

This week also saw the partnership of Webmedx and NLP International. Under the agreement, Webmedx, which provides medical transcription speech recognition and analytics, will harness NLPI’s language processing software to boost the data mining and search capabilities of its QualityAnalytics product line. The NLP software will expand Webmedx customers’ ability to mine discrete, structured data from physicians’ transcribed, narrative reports. 

Better communication among stakeholders was also at the heart of the HHS’ announcement of $473 million worth of grants and contracts to support comparative effectiveness research projects, which aim to help people make healthcare decisions based on the best evidence of effectiveness.

The funded grants and contracts fall into several categories, including translation and dissemination, evidence generation and the community forum. A dose of clarity in these efforts will result in better care.

Mary Stevens, Editor
mstevens@trimedmedia.com