The Standard

In July 2021, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) hosted its second HL7® FHIR® Connectathon, welcoming over 800 participants from Federal agencies, payer organizations, and the health IT industry to a three-day event with more than 70 presentations focusing on education, implementation guide testing, and community-building around Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR)-based application programming interfaces (APIs).

The first day of this exciting event focused on educational presentations for Connectathon participants of all levels of familiarity with FHIR-based APIs and the HL7 implementation guides (IGs). Mary Greene, M.D. Director of the Office of Burden Reduction and Health Informatics welcomed participants to the event. Panels throughout the day focused on the data exchange requirements in the May 2020 CMS Interoperability and Patient Access final rule, reviews of various FHIR-based APIs, as well as FHIR implementation guides.

The second and third days of this event offered the opportunity for participants to further explore specific implementation guides and FHIR-based APIs. Participants learned more about implementation guides and reference implementations, in addition to having the opportunity to test and validate their own APIs. The event included panel discussions on testing and certification, patient cost transparency, application registration and endpoint directory best practices.

Registered participants will have access to all event recordings via Whova for the next three months. Recorded sessions are also available on HL7’s Education on Demand site but please note, you will need to be logged into HL7.org to view.

Should you have any further questions about this or future Connectathons, please reach out to CMS at cmshealthinformaticsandinteroperabilitygroup@cms.hhs.gov or reference the HL7 site at http://www.hl7.org/events/cms/.

Thank you to our partners at HL7, our industry panelists and presenters, and to all who were able to participate!