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Section[ Introduction

Title[ How DEEDS Was Developed

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

The impetus for developing DEEDS was a 1994 national conference on the status of emergency medicine sponsored by the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation (Bowles, 1995). Numerous Macy conference participants acknowledged that shortcomings in available data limit our capacity to answer many fundamental clinical, epidemiologic, and health care service questions about ED patients.  As a result, participants representing the major emergency medicine and nursing professional associations expressed a keen interest in joining CDC in sponsoring a national workshop on the development of ED record systems.

CDC invited six professional associations and three federal agencies to cosponsor, plan, and convene the National Workshop on Emergency Department Data — the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research, American College of Emergency Physicians, American Health Information Management Association, American Hospital Association, Emer- gency Nurses Association, Health Resources and Services Administration, National As- sociation of Emergency Medical Services Physicians, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and Society for Academic Emergency Medicine.

Representatives of these agencies and associations (the workshop planning group) met in 1994 and 1995 to define the goals for the workshop, set the agenda, draft the proposed data elements, invite other agencies and organizations to participate, and select work- shop facilitators.  The National Workshop on Emergency Department Data was held

in January 1996, providing a public forum for review and discussion of an early draft of DEEDS.  The 160 workshop participants, among them representatives of 12 federal agencies and 35 professional associations, contributed many valuable recommenda- tions for improving the document.  The workshop planning group and facilitators, reconstituted as the DEEDS Writing Committee, met in April 1996 and incorporated as many workshop recommendations as possible into a revised version of the data elements.  Review of this revision began in July 1996.  The DEEDS Writing Committee

met again in October 1996 to act on reviewers’ input and completed work on Release 1.0

in January 1997.