The Standard

HL7 Da Vinci Project Event Wednesday, July 22, from 4:00 – 5:30 p.m. EDT

Quality measurement is a key factor in improving the delivery of care, especially in value-based care arrangements. And it has become clear that as the shift to value-based care continues, the need for payer-provider collaboration has become essential.

The exchange of data among healthcare industry members can help organizations improve quality, and HL7’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) can play a significant role. The next Community Roundtable hosted by the HL7 Da Vinci Project entitled “What It Takes: How to Leverage the HL7 Da Vinci Project to Drive Quality Measurement and Value-Based Care,” will examine how organizations are making progress in sharing information for quality purposes.

The roundtable discussion will begin with Jocelyn Keegan, the Da Vinci program manager, providing an overview on the status, maturity and resources available for emerging implementations across Da Vinci focus areas.

Report from Virtual FHIR DevDays 2020 on HL7 Da Vinci Project Use Cases

Developers are fine-tuning ways to use the HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource (FHIR) standard to reduce communication challenges and decision impediments between providers and payers.

Working on use cases involving coverage and burden reduction, the HL7 Da Vinci Project is refining early versions of standards and developing implementation guides for value based care (VBC). Speaking to more than 150 attendees during the virtual HL7 FHIR DevDays event, Dr. Viet Nguyen, Da Vinci Project Technical Director, noted that the coverage and burden reduction use cases are intended to address workflows around provider-payer interactions. FHIR implementation guides are then created based on a set of use cases. 

Coverage Requirements Discovery

One use case, Coverage Requirements Discovery, gives providers real-time access to payer approval requirements, documentation and rules at point of service to reduce provider burden and support treatment planning. In its essence, this would answer a provider’s question about whether a procedure or treatment needs a prior authorization from a payer. The aim is to use CDS Hooks to supply an answer to a clinician posing the request within his or her workflow. Work is continuing on developing an implementation guide for this use case.

Report from Virtual FHIR DevDays 2020

A New York State initiative is aiming to change its approach for exchanging patients’ health information among the state’s health information exchanges, using HL7’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) standard as the conduit.

In addition, the new approach being implemented for the State Health Information Network for New York (SHIN-NY) has taken less time to develop and is expected to enable the exchange of more granular patient data than is possible with the current approach.

Speaking at the HL7 FHIR DevDays virtual meeting on June 15, Luke Doles, senior director of services management for the New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC), said further implementation of the FHIR-based framework has been delayed because of the urgency to shift resources to support the state’s COVID-19 response. However, the initiative has thus far proven that the concept can be expanded to provide more information across SHIN-NY.

Report from Virtual FHIR DevDays 2020

Work on incorporating application programming interfaces using HL7’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) standard can help healthcare organizations better manage the COVID-19 crisis, but much more could be done.

A virtual panel at HL7’s FHIR DevDays indicated that API usage can help with the sharing of data, but more widespread use of this supportive programming could provide more benefits.

“If you look inside the typical hospital, there are more than 20 different clinical systems being used, but only one is the electronic health record getting the API love,” said Keith Boone, enterprise architect for Audacious Inquiry. “COVID data is showing up in bed management systems, command and control systems, ICU central monitoring and more.” Those systems are five years behind EHRs in enabling data exchange.

Presenters at the May 27 HL7 Da Vinci Project community roundtable provided concrete evidence demonstrating how the use cases represent specific ways to use HL7’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) standard for specific purposes in value-based care data exchange interactions between providers and payers.

FHIR for Data Exchange for Quality Measurement (DEQM) Use Case

A clear indication of the value of the medication reconciliation process use case was provided by Kirk Anderson, chief technology officer for Cambia Health Solutions, a nonprofit healthcare organization that’s the parent company of Regence, a member of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association. Initial efforts to use the FHIR use case with MultiCare, a Tacoma, Washington-based healthcare system, resulted in a dramatic boost in the insurer’s ability to get information on members’ prescribed medications from the provider.

Report from Virtual FHIR DevDays 2020

A new initiative is making rapid progress in developing a way to improve how providers report COVID 19 data to public health agencies.

Started in late March, the Situational Awareness for Novel Epidemic Response (SANER) Project has made “huge progress in a short period of time,” said Keith Boone, enterprise architect for Audacious Inquiry, a consulting firm that helped to start the initiative.

Join the HL7 Da Vinci Project Community Roundtable June 24 from 4 – 5:30 pm EDT.

Much Progress Made on This and Other Da Vinci Project Use Cases During Recent FHIR Connectathon

The HL7 Da Vinci Project’s Gaps in Care use case continues to make rapid progress in developing a Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®)-based solution to help payers, providers and patients improve care quality under value-based care scenarios.

Several issues were addressed during last month’s Virtual FHIR Connectathon, and the hope is that an implementation guide update for the standard will be balloted in September stated Viet Nguyen, MD and Yan Heras, who are leading the work on the use case. The progress and work on the Gaps in Care use case exemplifies work done on several Da Vinci Project use cases during the Connectathon.

Next week, developers working with health data are gathering at the FHIR Dev Days conference, June 15-18, 2020, and Microsoft is pleased to host the “Hack on FHIR.”  Get coding time, explore the FHIR spec, and learn the platforms helping organizations innovate using technology that removes barriers to interoperability.

In the world of technology, new inventions and ideas are introduced daily. It’s become common to brand a new technology platform as one that will “revolutionize” or “transform" the world as we know it.  But in most cases, the true test of new technology is far more than slogans or hype, it’s how that tech stands up in a crisis or an emergency.  

The COVID-19 pandemic is helping to reveal new ways to use HL7’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource (FHIR®) standard to share healthcare information and coordinate services, but systemic shortcomings in existing health information systems are hampering coordination of a national response.

FHIR is being used in some initial efforts to support public health efforts, and it has the potential to rapidly address approaches to gather data and coordinate research across the planet, said Wayne Kubick, chief technology officer for HL7 International.

“The FHIR platform can enable multiple apps to rapidly address urgent new use cases, such as public health,” said Kubick during a webinar on April 30, hosted by HL7 and sponsored by CitiusTech, entitled “Data Sharing in the Spotlight: COVID Gaps, Interop Rules and The Path Forward.”

Because FHIR enables data to be easily accessed by open source apps, it can help in the rapid response needed to the current pandemic, Kubick said. “Increased global adoption can help to get to a common platform of collaboration around the world; a FHIR infrastructure is the first step in a long process – to take advantage of this infrastructure, it will require further innovative, agile methods to build out implementation guides. Standards can’t solve the problem entirely – we need the infrastructure there to support rapid response capabilities.”