HL7 Event Provides Training to Prepare for Implementing APIs

The Virtual FHIR Patient Access API Implementation Event Scheduled for  August 17-19

The start of the New Year will see healthcare organizations facing new requirements for using application programming interfaces (API) to facilitate the sharing of healthcare information.

That’s made clear by the recent release of final rules by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), which will be the first step in enabling data access.

To help support healthcare organizations in this shift, HL7 is holding the virtual FHIR Patient Access API Implementation event next week. With the impending final rule and the looming implementation deadline, this event will be narrowly focused on the requirements for patient access APIs by payers.

The goals for this Implementation-a-thon and associated educational events are to inform the broader community of the work HL7 FHIR Accelerators have done to lay the groundwork for meeting the final rules; and to help participants prepare for the September HL7 FHIR Connectathon and 34^th Annual Plenary & Working Group Meeting.

Education and specific planning in API implementation in a FHIR environment will be important for the industry, as these recently released federal rules require that consumers be able to access their medical information through third-party apps, and that will place pressure on healthcare organizations to develop APIs to enable this access. The HL7 Da Vinci Project continues to develop use cases that will facilitate this patient access to information.

This event is intended to support individuals and organizations that are at a variety of levels of expertise with HL7 FHIR:

• For organizations that are relatively new to the standard, basic FHIR education and additional implementation guides (IGs) will advance their expertise and enable them to get off to a good start on FHIR development activities.
• Organizations already working with FHIR but not engaged in the payer based implementation guides will better understand the relationship of these guides to the requirements of the final rules.
• Those who have already started to implement these guides will be able to test their implementation with others.

The first day of sessions on Monday, August 17, will feature a keynote by Dr. Mary Greene,  the Director of the Office of Burden Reduction & Health Informatics at CMS, as well as an overview of the landscape for API implementation. On Tuesday, sessions will focus on the work of the Da Vinci Project, the CARIN IG and other crucial tools for interoperability. On Wednesday, the emphasis will shift to real-world implementation strategies.

Register Today!

Details and registration information for the FHIR Patient Access API Implementation Event is available here: www.hl7.org/events/fhir/implementation/2020/.