Appl Clin Inform 2024; 15(02): 342-356
DOI: 10.1055/a-2291-1482
Research Article

Pediatric Consent on FHIR

Anton Voronov
1   College of Health Solutions, Arizona State University, Phoenix, Arizona, United States
,
Mohammad Jafari
1   College of Health Solutions, Arizona State University, Phoenix, Arizona, United States
,
Lin Zhao
2   HonorHealth, Phoenix, Arizona, United States
,
Melissa Soliz
3   Coppersmith Brockelman PLC, Phoenix, Arizona, United States
,
Qixuan Hong
4   Ira A Fulton School of Engineering, Arizona State University, Phoenix, Arizona, United States
,
John Pope
2   HonorHealth, Phoenix, Arizona, United States
,
Darwyn Chern
5   Copa Health, Phoenix, Arizona, United States
,
Megan Lipman
6   Jewish Family and Children's Services, Phoenix, Arizona, United States
,
Adela Grando
1   College of Health Solutions, Arizona State University, Phoenix, Arizona, United States
› Author Affiliations
Funding This research was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, through the Substance Use HeAlth REcords Sharing (SHARES) grant (9R01DA056984-06A1).

Abstract

Background Standardizing and formalizing consent processes and forms can prevent ambiguities, convey a more precise meaning, and support machine interpretation of consent terms.

Objectives Our goal was to introduce a systematic approach to standardizing and digitizing pediatric consent forms, which are complex due to legal requirements for child and legal guardian involvement.

Methods First, we reviewed the consent requirements from the Arizona regulation, and we used 21 pediatric treatment consents from five Arizona health care organizations to propose and evaluate an implementation-agnostic Consent for Treatment Framework. Second, we assessed the adequacy of the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) to support the proposed framework.

Results The resulting Consent for Treatment Framework supports compliance with the state consent requirements and has been validated with pediatric consent forms. We also demonstrated that the FHIR standard has the required expressiveness to compute the framework's specifications and express the 21 consent forms.

Conclusion Health care organizations can apply the shared open-source code and FHIR implementation guidelines to standardize the design of machine-interpretable pediatric treatment consent forms. The resulting FHIR-based executable models may support compliance with the law and support interoperability and data sharing.

Note

This study does not engage human subjects. The Arizona State University Institutional Review Board deemed the research exempted.


Supplementary Material



Publication History

Received: 07 January 2024

Accepted: 18 March 2024

Accepted Manuscript online:
20 March 2024

Article published online:
08 May 2024

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