Sol Pray's child receives treatment for Severe Acute Malnutrition and follow-up counseling every week at a health center in Ratanakiri province.
L3 Implementation Guide
Transforms L2 Digital Adaptation Kit (DAK) components into standards-based software code that accurately reflects guideline decision logic and data requirements.
The Implementation Guide the third layer of the CCC project using SMART Guidelines (L3) and can be used as a source for countries and external partners for their digital health apps.
The Clinical Care in Crises Implementation Guide transforms the L2 DAK into structured, software-neutral specifications, code, terminology and interoperability standards. This third layer provides machine-readable code necessary for software developers to incorporate standardised logic from WHO guidelines into digital systems.
Using FHIR and HL7 standards, the Clinical Care in Crises Implementation Guide is interoperable and can be used by countries and external partners in existing or new digital health apps.
These recommendations will help Ministries of Health and other operational partners take informed decisions on which digital solutions to adopt and invest in for emergencies. Thanks to the expansion of digital health solutions, WHO’s guidelines are more accessible than ever before bringing improved standards of care to everyone.
What is the Clinical Care in Crises Implementation Guide?
The Implementation Guide provides code necessary for software developers to incorporate standardised logic from WHO guidelines into digital systems.
The use of this layer ensures they can be tested for conformance to standards while ensuring fidelity to WHO recommendations.
Which interoperability standards are used?
As with other SMART Guideline initiatives, CCC adheres to HL7 FHIR and CQL standards.
The L3 Implementation Guide maps L2 content to value sets and Health Level Seven International (HL7) Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standards. Alongside data standards from L2, this allows for semantic and syntactic interoperability at scale.
The logic derived from guidelines, which might include clinical decision support and calculations for performance indicators, is encoded into Clinical Quality Language (CQL). This ensures that key indicators are consistently extracted to support patient care, as well as case surveillance and program monitoring.
What is the output?
The output of the L3 work is a Clinical Care in Crises Implementation Guide for use in emergencies.
Digital solutions which adopt this Implementation Guide will in turn be testable for conformance to interoperability standards against a set of evaluation criteria. These will help Ministries of Health and other operational partners to take informed decisions on which digital solutions to adopt and invest in for emergencies.
Who should use the Implementation Guide?
The Implementation Guide is intended for use by software developers who wish to develop person-centred digital tracking and decision-support (DTDS) systems that conform to WHO recommendations in emergencies.
Where can I access the Implementation Guide?
The global CCC FHIR Implementation Guide is available on the WHO GitHub page here:
