HHS' Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT will launch a new initiative early next year focused on developing a national data standard for patient addresses in healthcare.
ONC will collaborate with Health Level 7, the National Council for Prescription Drug Programs and X12 on the new initiative, dubbed Project US@. Additional standards development organizations and members of the Health Standards Collaborative will also work on the project, according to the Dec. 1 blog post.
Patient addresses are used across the industry for patient matching and linking health records, but the formatting approach is typically left for the implementer to decide. Without specific constraints in place, implementers use various free and third-party tools, resources and methods to normalize address representations.
With Project US@, ONC aims to issue a unified, cross-standards development organization and healthcare industrywide specification for representing addresses within 2021.