The Health Story project started in 2007 and represents an alliance of 25 healthcare providers, vendors, and associations, including the American Health Information Management Association, the Association for Healthcare Documentation Integrity, the Clinical Documentation Industry Association, HL7 International, and the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society.

These entities pooled their resources in an initiative to produce data standards through HL7 for the flow of information between common types of healthcare documents and patient medical records. Approximately 1.2 billion clinical documents are produced in the U.S. each year, with approximately 60% containing clinical information. Most of these are not interchangeable.

While radiology reports contain information contained in narrative description, current IT solutions fail to effectively integrate the information and content contained in these reports. Van Terheyden, a member of the project's executive committee and chief medical information officer of Nuance Communications, will discuss how to effectively make information captured in radiology reports available for reuse as structured data to support requirements for meaningful use as defined by the U.S. Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.