The health eDecisions authoring environment for shareable clinical decision support artifacts

In 2012, the U.S. Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology established the Health eDecisions (HeD) Initiative. One of the goals of this initiative was the development of a standard model-based representation and XML exchange format for best-practice clinical knowledge in the form of decision support rules, clinical order sets and documentation templates. The standard would later become a candidate requirement for electronic health record sys- Tems as part of Meaningful Use Stage III. To facilitate the rapid diffusion of the standard, a project was started to build an authoring and editing tool for the HeD knowledge artifacts in the context of the SHARPc-2B grant. The tool, whose initial architecture and prototype is presented in this work, is model driven, based on semantic web technologies, compatible with a number of preexisting standards and ultimately designed to enable authoring not only by knowledge engineers but also by subject matter experts working at a non-technical level.