Remote Activity Categories

Categories for remote fittings have been defined and included as a HIMSA data standard.

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The NotificationAction-303-500.xsd schema file defines the element "category" as a string value.  As of May 1, 2019 the list of valid, approved, and enforced categories are listed below.

As patients will begin to receive more care remotely (not in the physical presence of a HCP) there will be benefits by incorporating data collected from the field into Noah.  Additionally, it will be helpful to categorize the data.  The main goal of this document is to define these categories so that all companies providing the data to Noah (e.g. assumed to be hearing instrument manufacturers) will categorize data in a common way.  If the categories are not applied the same then the HCP may be confused or have a harder time understanding what the data is about.  More details about the level of complexity of the categories will be presented further down.  First it is important to have a general understanding about some key concepts.

For the rest of the document the term DATA will be used to generically represent information that is associated with a remote fitting, patient activity (use of the instruments) and patient feedback.

DATA that is collected from the field is:

• Collected from the patient by the manufacturer interfacing with the patient's App, which the manufacturer has also created

• Assumed to be processed in some way by the manufacturer to provide a useful benefit to the HCP. This processing is assumed to be done using a back-end system supplied by the manufacturer.

• Provided to the HCP's Noah installation by the hearing instrument manufacturer.

The DATA that is provided to Noah will be formatted in general terms as a Noah Action.  This means that there will be data storage for public data (following a HIMSA defined data standard) and private data (following a data standard only understood by the creator of the data (the manufacturer).

Important Information about Categories

• Categories are designed to be helpful to a HCP (not the patient) but are very neutral in nature.  The categories will help HCP more quickly determine the general idea about what the data is a about, meta data. 

• Categories are not designed to be used for statistical analysis (e.g. satisfaction scoring).

• Categories will not be used by Noah to apply workflow or business rules in an automated fashion.  It seems reasonable that the a HCP may react differently when they see one category versus another but Noah will not.

• Categories will have short names.

• When DATA is Categorized it will also be possible and recommended to include a text description for further details.  The text description will not be standardized.

Q: Would manufacturers be expected to support providing information for all of the below categories?

A: No, This is an individual company decision. However, each company is expected to make every reasonable effort to use the categories according to the definition.