Omaha System Guidelines

The Omaha System Guidelines app enables timely dissemination of evidence-based interventions to address critical health needs across populations, programs, and practices. The Omaha System community of practice began working on standardizing evidence-based guidelines in 2013, and to date have published over 1,000 interventions in our web site, omahasystemguidelines.org. The Omaha System community of practice together with healthcare providers and community members established this open-source app as a tool for everyone to access an up to date synthesis of the latest interventions, their sources, and structured codes. We will continuously maintain the content as interventions change.

Features:
• In this first version of OSGuidelines we focus on guidelines for disease prevention and control. Over 90 best practice interventions are described in detail, supported by sources such as the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the World Health Organization. Our goal is to advance community collaboration around the use of best practices to enhance health care and optimize outcomes.
• Each intervention is encoded with clinical terminology codes SNOMED CT and Omaha System to enable rapid adoption within electronic health records and other platforms.
• Intervention content is searchable through free text as well as by role, action category, and intervention target terms.
• Resources are provided including a video introduction to the Omaha System and links to on-line materials.
• Additional functionality allows for users to share feedback to the app developers and the Omaha System community of practice.

Rigor: The Omaha System is a powerful ontology, taxonomy, classification, and terminology for health and healthcare that has been used for 3 decades in health care around the world. It has the ability to describe all of health across environmental, psychosocial, physiological, and health-related behaviors domains, including the social determinants of health. It also measures all of health on a continuum, capturing strengths as well as challenges and needs. Using the Omaha System to describe and document care generates data that portrays individual and population health in a comprehensive, holistic way. Yet, it is intended to be simple enough for everyone to use and has been effectively deployed within surveys and apps for patients, consumers, and informal caregivers as well as health care clinicians. To learn more about the Omaha System, you can visit omahasystem.org. SNOMED CT is a reference terminology, within which the Omaha System is embedded. To learn more about SNOMED CT, you can visit snomed.org