Investigating the Importance of Standard Metadata Template Elements for Health Information Organizations

The establishment of an integrated and standard metadata system tailored to the local needs in health information management, which aims to improve the current conditions, will lead to optimal data protection, increase accessibility, and improve information retrieval and user satisfaction. Therefore, this study intends to study the elements of the HISO 10040.4 schema for organizing clinical information from the perspective of health information specialists.

This applied research was conducted in 1401 winter, and to collect data, documentary study and survey research were used. The statistical population of this study included 24 faculty members from Tehran University Medical Sciences in the field of health information management. An online researcher created a questionnaire with 23 questions that was used to collect data, and its face validity was confirmed by 3 experts. Finally, the results were reported using descriptive statistics.

To organize health information, 22 metadata elements of the HISO 10040.4 schema were scored and evaluated by experts. Based on the results, the mean and standard deviation of the measured metadata elements were approved by the research community, indicating the extent of their agreement regarding the importance of these elements in describing data in health information centers worksheets.

The proposed metadata elements of this research are based on the standard schema of organizing health information and approved by the research community; therefore, they can meet the needs of health information centers.