The short answer is no – Open Referral’s Human Service Data Specifications are the industry standard for resource directory information exchange.
In the United States, this is a result of the Alliance of Information and Referral System’s endorsement of HSDS as one of their standards for the industry of Information and Referral; in the United Kingdom, this has been established by the national government’s standards body.
There are of course other existing standards that are relevant to this domain, such as
- The W3C’s civic services schema, proposed to the W3C through Schema.org
- The human services domain of the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM)
- FHIR’s HealthcareService resources
Fortunately, HSDS is designed to be an interchange format – which means it can enable interoperability across domains by translation into other standards. For instance, we have translated HSDS into the schema.org markup for legal aid services; and we have also developed implementation guidance for querying HSDS data in FHIR.
Do you have another standard in mind that seems relevant to this work? Post in our forum about it and let’s discuss!
Posted in: Overview, Strategic Questions