Redwood MedNet :: Glossary

caBIG - Cancer Bioinformatics Grid. See Grid Computing

CAeHC - California eHealth Collaborative is a nonprofit organized to help coordinate ehealth activities in California. CAeHC produces informational webinars and provides collaborative consulting services to community and statewide clients.

Cal eConnect - HIE Governance entity. See ARRA, CalHIPSO, HITECH, REC, SDE

CalHIPSO - California Health Information Partnership and Services Organization, one of the Regional Extension Centers (REC) for California. See ARRA, Cal eConnect, HITECH, REC, SDE

California eHealth Collaborative See CAeHC

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California Endowment - The California Endowment is a private, statewide health foundation that was created in 1996 as a result of Blue Cross of California's creation of WellPoint Health Networks, a for-profit corporation. This conversion set the groundwork for The California Endowment's mission: to expand access to affordable, quality health care for underserved individuals and communities, and to promote fundamental improvements in the health status of all Californians. See CHCF

CalPSAB - California Privacy and Security Advisory Board. See HISPC

CalREC - Original name of applicant for statewide Regional Extension Center (REC), rebranded as CalHIPSO. See CalHIPSO, REC

CAP - College of American Pathologists. See SNOMED

CAQH - Council for Affordable Quality Healthcare. See CORE

Cardiac ECHO - See Echocardiogram

Care Pathway - Structured, multidisplinary plans of care designed to support evidence based practice through the implementation of clinical guidelines and protocols. Also called "Integrated Care Pathways" and "Clinical Pathways." See Algorithm, Guideline, Protocol

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cc - Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation seeking to make it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright. Creative Commons provides free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the level of freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof. The Redwood MedNet Health Informatics Glossary is copyrighted under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike License. See DRM, FOSS, GPL, IP, PLoS, Open Source

CCBH - Connecting Communities for Better Health, a nationwide project managed by the e-Health Initiative, featuring a monthly webinar with technology, policy and legislative updates. See e-Health Initiative

CCD - The Continuity of Care Document is a specification intended to standardize the encoding, structure and semantics of a patient care summary document prepared for exchange between two electronic health data systems. The CCD specification is part of the Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) standard. CCD was developed as a collaborative effort between ASTM and HL7 by seeking a way to express the CCR within the CDA standard. See ASTM, CDA, CCR, HL7

CCHIT - Certification Commission for Health Information Technology, a voluntary private sector organization launched in 2004 by ONC to certify health information technology components such as electronic health record services and the networks hosting the services. See ONC

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CCR - The Continuity of Care Record is an exported XML file format intended to be sent to the next healthcare provider whenever a patient is referred, transferred, or otherwise uses different clinics, hospitals, or other providers. CCR is a standard file specification developed jointly by ASTM, Massachusetts Medical Society, HIMSS, American Academy of Family Physicians, American Academy of Pediatrics, and American Medical Association. See AAFP, AMA, ASTM, CCD, CDA, HIMSS

CDA - Clinical Document Architecture is based on the HL7 Reference Information Model (RIM). The CDA seeks to leverage standardized XML-based markup formats to specify the encoding, structure and semantics of clinical documents for electronic exchange between different computing environments. See CCR, HL7, RIM, XML

CDC - Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an agency in the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services. The mission of the CDC is to promote health and quality of life by preventing and controlling disease, injury, and disability. The CDC is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. See CDPH, HHS

CDISC - Clinica Data Interchange Standards Consortium.

CDMA - Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) is one of two competing global wireless signal standards for cell phones. Verizon, Sprint and US Cellular use CDMA in the US market. Globally, CDMA has roughly a 15% market share, as most of world's cell phones use the GSM standard. See GSM

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CDPH - The California Department of Public Health. The mission of CDPH is to protect and promote California's health by making the state a place where all people can enjoy the best health possible, and can live, grow and prosper in clean and safe communities. CDPH is part of CHHS. See CHHS, CDC

CDR - A clinical data repository (CDR) is a database or datastore that hosts clinical data. See Data Repository

CDS - Clinical Decision Support. See Decision Support

CeC - See Cal eConnect

CEN 251 - European Standardization Committee (Comité Européen de Normalisation) for medical informatics.

CEO - Chief Executive Officer.

CERN - Conseil Européan pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN), known in English as the European Particle Physics Laboratory, where the World Wide Web was invented by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. See HTML, W3C, WWW

Certificate Authority - An independent agency that issues, verifies and stores public and private encryption keys as digital certificates. See Authentication, Digital Certificate, Encryption

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Certification - A third party verification process intended to assure that all or part of a system conforms to specific published requirements.

CFO - Chief Financial Officer.

CFR - Code of Federal Regulations

CHA - California Hospital Association.

Channel - In health data interface engineering, a channel is the formal synchronous and sequential process model that enables content (objects) to be parsed, filtered, and transformed. See DSL, Signal

CHCF - The California HealthCare Foundation is an independent philanthropy committed to improving the way health care is delivered and financed in California. See California Endowment

CHCS - [1] The Composite Health Care System is the legacy health information system for the U.S. Department of Defense. [2] Center for Health Care Strategies is a health policy institute. See AHLTA, DoD, FHIE, MHS

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Checklist - A checklist provides two primary benefits: first, as a memory aid for potentially overlooked steps in a complex procedure (e.g., is the head of each patient propped up at least 30 degrees so oral secretions can't go into the windpipe?"); and second, to make explicit the minimum expected steps in a complex process. Clinical care checklists, copied from airline pilot safety checklists, have been shown to dramatically increase the quality of health care.

CHHS - California Health and Human Services agency administers state and federal programs for health care, social services, public assistance and rehabilitation in California. See CDPH, DHCS, DMH, DMHC

CHI - [1] Consolidated Health Informatics was a Presidential eGovernment initiative with the goal of adopting vocabulary and messaging standards to facilitate communication of clinical information across the federal health enterprise. CHI activities currently fall under the Federal Health Architecture initiative. [2] Center for Health Improvement [3] California Healthcare Institue See FHA

CHIN - Community Health Information Network. CHINs, formed in the 1990s, were early attempts to enable broad community health information exchange. Most CHINs were expensive disappointments that were decommissioned when the initial Federal funding expired, but the experiment was an essential foundational phase that enabled the rise of health information exchange in the next decade. Two notable CHINs that survived are OCHIN (Oregon CHIN) and UHIN (Utah Health Information Network). See HIE, RHIO

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Chronic Care Model - Developed by Edward H. Wagner, MD, the model promotes effective change in provider groups to support evidence-based clinical and quality improvement across a wide variety of health care settings.

CIO - Chief Information Officer.

C!TL - Center for Information Technology Leadership

CLIA - Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments.

Client - A generic term for a computer which connects to a network and retrieves data from a server on the network. See Network, Server

Client-Server - A network application architecture which separates the client (with or without a graphical user interface) from the server. Server software typically runs on robust computers dedicated exclusively to a specific application, such as an EHR. Client software typically runs on common PCs or workstations. See ASP, GUI, PC, Server

Clinical Data Repository See CDR

Clinical Messaging - Communication of electronic clinical data either in real time messages (e.g., clinical readings from a home monitoring device) or in a store and forward format (e.g., referral consult, laboratory test result, etc.) pushed to an inbox or a workflow queue. See HIE

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Clinical Practice Guideline - See Guideline

Cloud Computing - The provisioning of dynamically scalable and frequently virtualized computer network resources as a service, generally on a utility subscription basis. See ASP, SaaS

CMA - California Medical Association.

CMIA - The Confidentiality of Medical Information Act is the California state law that governs individually identifiable health information. See HIPAA, IIHI

CMO - Chief Medical Officer.

CMS - Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, an agency in the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services. The mission of CMS is to assure health care security for Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries. CMS is the successor to the agency formerly known as HCFA. See GCPI, HCFA, HHS, IPPE, MPFS, PE, PPPS, RVU

CNO - Chief Nursing Officer.

Code Set - A code set consists of data elements (the codes) and a description of each data element. The administrative simplification provisions of HIPAA require HHS to adopt standard code sets for administrative and financial transactions. See HIPAA

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Common Framework - The Common Framework, as defined by Connecting for Health, consists of the essential technical and policy requirements to enable the secure and private interoperation of standard interfaces and health data exchange transactions at the local, regional and national level. See Connecting for Health, RLS

Community of Practice See COP

Computer Icon - A computer icon (or simply an icon) is a small pictogram used in file naming on a computer with a graphical user interface. Icons were developed at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. See GUI, PARC

Concept - A concept is a cognitive unit of meaning, an abstract idea or a mental symbol sometimes defined as a unit of knowledge. See Algorithm, Model, Ontology, Semantics, Symbol, Taxonomy, Terminology

Confidentiality - A third party's obligation to protect individually identifiable health information (IIHI) from disclosure to unauthorized individuals. See Breach, Disclosure, HIPAA, IHII

CONNECT - An open source software gateway that supports health information exchange, both locally and at the national level. CONNECT uses NHIN standards to enable the secure electronic exchange of health data. Redwood MedNet operates a CONNECT gateway. See IHE, NHIN, NHIN Direct, XMPP

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Connecting for Health - A national collaborative convened by the Markle Foundation with additional support by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and focused on achieving consensus on connectivity in health care to create a rich health information environment. See Common Framework, RLS

COO - Chief Operations Officer.

COP - In general, a Community of Practice (COP) is a self-directed cohort of participants organized around a specific topic. For example, the COPs sponsored by PHIN. See InfoLinks, PHIN

CORBA - Common Object Request Broker Architecture. A language independent object model developed by the Object Management Group (OMG). CORBA implementations are rare and its goals largely unaccomplished but its history is illustrative of the best intentions of software engineers to design towards interoperability. See OMG

CORE - Committee on Operating Rules for health information Exchange, a voluntary community standard for processing online eligibility and benefits enquiries, operated as a project of the CAQH. See CAQH

COTS - Commercial Off The Shelf. Generally used to describe software.

Covered Entity - A covered entity is a health plan, clearinghouse or health care provider that conducts any standard electronic transactions. See Business Associate, HIPAA

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CPO - Chief Privacy Officer.

CPOE - Computer Physician Order Entry, the historic term for electronic charting by physicians. CPOE originated in hospitals in the 1970s, and is a mandated feature of the HITECH "Meaningful Use" measures. See EHR, EMR, HITECH, Meaningful Use

CPRS - Computerized Patient Record System, the integrated, comprehensive suite of clinical applications built by the US Veterans Administration to create a longitudinal view of the veteran's electronic health record. See CHCS, OpenVistA, RPMS, VistA, WorldVistA

CPT - Current Procedural Terminology, a code set developed, maintained and copyrighted by the American Medical Association. The CPT code set provides annual licensing income to the AMA. The CPT code set, which accurately describes medical, surgical, and diagnostic services, is designed to facilitate billing and reimbursement in the American health care system. CPT codes are of marginal use for clinical care. See AMA, ICD

Creative Commons See cc

CRM - Customer relationship management (CRM) denotes the business processes used by an organization to track and organize contacts with its current and prospective customers. Also refers to the software that tracks and coordinates the customer relationship business process. CRM grew up from simple contact management systems into an integral component in an ERP system. See ERP, MRP

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CSRHA - California State Rural Health Association.

CSTE - Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists. See ASTHO

CTO - Chief Technology Officer.

CVX - Codes in HL7 v2.3 Table 0292, describing a set of vaccines that may be admininistered. HL7, MVX, QDP, VXU


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	Health Informatics Glossary A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z caBIG - Cancer Bioinformatics Grid. See Grid Computing CAeHC - California eHealth Collaborative is a nonprofit organized to help coordinate ehealth activities in California. CAeHC produces informational webinars and provides collaborative consulting services to community and statewide clients. Cal eConnect - HIE Governance entity. See ARRA, CalHIPSO, HITECH, REC, SDE CalHIPSO - California Health Information Partnership and Services Organization, one of the Regional Extension Centers (REC) for California. See ARRA, Cal eConnect, HITECH, REC, SDE California eHealth Collaborative See CAeHC top California Endowment - The California Endowment is a private, statewide health foundation that was created in 1996 as a result of Blue Cross of California's creation of WellPoint Health Networks, a for-profit corporation. This conversion set the groundwork for The California Endowment's mission: to expand access to affordable, quality health care for underserved individuals and communities, and to promote fundamental improvements in the health status of all Californians. See CHCF CalPSAB - California Privacy and Security Advisory Board. See HISPC CalREC - Original name of applicant for statewide Regional Extension Center (REC), rebranded as CalHIPSO. See CalHIPSO, REC CAP - College of American Pathologists. See SNOMED CAQH - Council for Affordable Quality Healthcare. See CORE Cardiac ECHO - See Echocardiogram Care Pathway - Structured, multidisplinary plans of care designed to support evidence based practice through the implementation of clinical guidelines and protocols. Also called "Integrated Care Pathways" and "Clinical Pathways." See Algorithm, Guideline, Protocol top cc - Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation seeking to make it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright. Creative Commons provides free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the level of freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof. The Redwood MedNet Health Informatics Glossary is copyrighted under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike License. See DRM, FOSS, GPL, IP, PLoS, Open Source CCBH - Connecting Communities for Better Health, a nationwide project managed by the e-Health Initiative, featuring a monthly webinar with technology, policy and legislative updates. See e-Health Initiative CCD - The Continuity of Care Document is a specification intended to standardize the encoding, structure and semantics of a patient care summary document prepared for exchange between two electronic health data systems. The CCD specification is part of the Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) standard. CCD was developed as a collaborative effort between ASTM and HL7 by seeking a way to express the CCR within the CDA standard. See ASTM, CDA, CCR, HL7 CCHIT - Certification Commission for Health Information Technology, a voluntary private sector organization launched in 2004 by ONC to certify health information technology components such as electronic health record services and the networks hosting the services. See ONC top CCR - The Continuity of Care Record is an exported XML file format intended to be sent to the next healthcare provider whenever a patient is referred, transferred, or otherwise uses different clinics, hospitals, or other providers. CCR is a standard file specification developed jointly by ASTM, Massachusetts Medical Society, HIMSS, American Academy of Family Physicians, American Academy of Pediatrics, and American Medical Association. See AAFP, AMA, ASTM, CCD, CDA, HIMSS CDA - Clinical Document Architecture is based on the HL7 Reference Information Model (RIM). The CDA seeks to leverage standardized XML-based markup formats to specify the encoding, structure and semantics of clinical documents for electronic exchange between different computing environments. See CCR, HL7, RIM, XML CDC - Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an agency in the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services. The mission of the CDC is to promote health and quality of life by preventing and controlling disease, injury, and disability. The CDC is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. See CDPH, HHS CDISC - Clinica Data Interchange Standards Consortium. CDMA - Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) is one of two competing global wireless signal standards for cell phones. Verizon, Sprint and US Cellular use CDMA in the US market. Globally, CDMA has roughly a 15% market share, as most of world's cell phones use the GSM standard. See GSM top CDPH - The California Department of Public Health. The mission of CDPH is to protect and promote California's health by making the state a place where all people can enjoy the best health possible, and can live, grow and prosper in clean and safe communities. CDPH is part of CHHS. See CHHS, CDC CDR - A clinical data repository (CDR) is a database or datastore that hosts clinical data. See Data Repository CDS - Clinical Decision Support. See Decision Support CeC - See Cal eConnect CEN 251 - European Standardization Committee (Comité Européen de Normalisation) for medical informatics. CEO - Chief Executive Officer. CERN - Conseil Européan pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN), known in English as the European Particle Physics Laboratory, where the World Wide Web was invented by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. See HTML, W3C, WWW Certificate Authority - An independent agency that issues, verifies and stores public and private encryption keys as digital certificates. See Authentication, Digital Certificate, Encryption top Certification - A third party verification process intended to assure that all or part of a system conforms to specific published requirements. CFO - Chief Financial Officer. CFR - Code of Federal Regulations CHA - California Hospital Association. Channel - In health data interface engineering, a channel is the formal synchronous and sequential process model that enables content (objects) to be parsed, filtered, and transformed. See DSL, Signal CHCF - The California HealthCare Foundation is an independent philanthropy committed to improving the way health care is delivered and financed in California. See California Endowment CHCS - [1] The Composite Health Care System is the legacy health information system for the U.S. Department of Defense. [2] Center for Health Care Strategies is a health policy institute. See AHLTA, DoD, FHIE, MHS top Checklist - A checklist provides two primary benefits: first, as a memory aid for potentially overlooked steps in a complex procedure (e.g., is the head of each patient propped up at least 30 degrees so oral secretions can't go into the windpipe?"); and second, to make explicit the minimum expected steps in a complex process. Clinical care checklists, copied from airline pilot safety checklists, have been shown to dramatically increase the quality of health care. CHHS - California Health and Human Services agency administers state and federal programs for health care, social services, public assistance and rehabilitation in California. See CDPH, DHCS, DMH, DMHC CHI - [1] Consolidated Health Informatics was a Presidential eGovernment initiative with the goal of adopting vocabulary and messaging standards to facilitate communication of clinical information across the federal health enterprise. CHI activities currently fall under the Federal Health Architecture initiative. [2] Center for Health Improvement [3] California Healthcare Institue See FHA CHIN - Community Health Information Network. CHINs, formed in the 1990s, were early attempts to enable broad community health information exchange. Most CHINs were expensive disappointments that were decommissioned when the initial Federal funding expired, but the experiment was an essential foundational phase that enabled the rise of health information exchange in the next decade. Two notable CHINs that survived are OCHIN (Oregon CHIN) and UHIN (Utah Health Information Network). See HIE, RHIO top Chronic Care Model - Developed by Edward H. Wagner, MD, the model promotes effective change in provider groups to support evidence-based clinical and quality improvement across a wide variety of health care settings. CIO - Chief Information Officer. C!TL - Center for Information Technology Leadership CLIA - Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments. Client - A generic term for a computer which connects to a network and retrieves data from a server on the network. See Network, Server Client-Server - A network application architecture which separates the client (with or without a graphical user interface) from the server. Server software typically runs on robust computers dedicated exclusively to a specific application, such as an EHR. Client software typically runs on common PCs or workstations. See ASP, GUI, PC, Server Clinical Data Repository See CDR Clinical Messaging - Communication of electronic clinical data either in real time messages (e.g., clinical readings from a home monitoring device) or in a store and forward format (e.g., referral consult, laboratory test result, etc.) pushed to an inbox or a workflow queue. See HIE top Clinical Practice Guideline - See Guideline Cloud Computing - The provisioning of dynamically scalable and frequently virtualized computer network resources as a service, generally on a utility subscription basis. See ASP, SaaS CMA - California Medical Association. CMIA - The Confidentiality of Medical Information Act is the California state law that governs individually identifiable health information. See HIPAA, IIHI CMO - Chief Medical Officer. CMS - Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, an agency in the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services. The mission of CMS is to assure health care security for Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries. CMS is the successor to the agency formerly known as HCFA. See GCPI, HCFA, HHS, IPPE, MPFS, PE, PPPS, RVU CNO - Chief Nursing Officer. Code Set - A code set consists of data elements (the codes) and a description of each data element. The administrative simplification provisions of HIPAA require HHS to adopt standard code sets for administrative and financial transactions. See HIPAA top Common Framework - The Common Framework, as defined by Connecting for Health, consists of the essential technical and policy requirements to enable the secure and private interoperation of standard interfaces and health data exchange transactions at the local, regional and national level. See Connecting for Health, RLS Community of Practice See COP Computer Icon - A computer icon (or simply an icon) is a small pictogram used in file naming on a computer with a graphical user interface. Icons were developed at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. See GUI, PARC Concept - A concept is a cognitive unit of meaning, an abstract idea or a mental symbol sometimes defined as a unit of knowledge. See Algorithm, Model, Ontology, Semantics, Symbol, Taxonomy, Terminology Confidentiality - A third party's obligation to protect individually identifiable health information (IIHI) from disclosure to unauthorized individuals. See Breach, Disclosure, HIPAA, IHII CONNECT - An open source software gateway that supports health information exchange, both locally and at the national level. CONNECT uses NHIN standards to enable the secure electronic exchange of health data. Redwood MedNet operates a CONNECT gateway. See IHE, NHIN, NHIN Direct, XMPP top Connecting for Health - A national collaborative convened by the Markle Foundation with additional support by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and focused on achieving consensus on connectivity in health care to create a rich health information environment. See Common Framework, RLS COO - Chief Operations Officer. COP - In general, a Community of Practice (COP) is a self-directed cohort of participants organized around a specific topic. For example, the COPs sponsored by PHIN. See InfoLinks, PHIN CORBA - Common Object Request Broker Architecture. A language independent object model developed by the Object Management Group (OMG). CORBA implementations are rare and its goals largely unaccomplished but its history is illustrative of the best intentions of software engineers to design towards interoperability. See OMG CORE - Committee on Operating Rules for health information Exchange, a voluntary community standard for processing online eligibility and benefits enquiries, operated as a project of the CAQH. See CAQH COTS - Commercial Off The Shelf. Generally used to describe software. Covered Entity - A covered entity is a health plan, clearinghouse or health care provider that conducts any standard electronic transactions. See Business Associate, HIPAA top CPO - Chief Privacy Officer. CPOE - Computer Physician Order Entry, the historic term for electronic charting by physicians. CPOE originated in hospitals in the 1970s, and is a mandated feature of the HITECH "Meaningful Use" measures. See EHR, EMR, HITECH, Meaningful Use CPRS - Computerized Patient Record System, the integrated, comprehensive suite of clinical applications built by the US Veterans Administration to create a longitudinal view of the veteran's electronic health record. See CHCS, OpenVistA, RPMS, VistA, WorldVistA CPT - Current Procedural Terminology, a code set developed, maintained and copyrighted by the American Medical Association. The CPT code set provides annual licensing income to the AMA. The CPT code set, which accurately describes medical, surgical, and diagnostic services, is designed to facilitate billing and reimbursement in the American health care system. CPT codes are of marginal use for clinical care. See AMA, ICD Creative Commons See cc CRM - Customer relationship management (CRM) denotes the business processes used by an organization to track and organize contacts with its current and prospective customers. Also refers to the software that tracks and coordinates the customer relationship business process. CRM grew up from simple contact management systems into an integral component in an ERP system. See ERP, MRP top CSRHA - California State Rural Health Association. CSTE - Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists. See ASTHO CTO - Chief Technology Officer. CVX - Codes in HL7 v2.3 Table 0292, describing a set of vaccines that may be admininistered. HL7, MVX, QDP, VXU

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