The Organization Welcomes Daniel Vreeman, D.P.T., Viet Nguyen, M.D., and Diego Kaminker
The Next Generation Standard Has Transformed Health Information Technology Across the Globe
HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®), the widely adopted, open-source standard from the HL7 International community, celebrates 10 years of international development and implementation. With the ability to streamline the many variations in health information technology (HIT) systems and the capacity to accommodate modern technology, FHIR is at the forefront of healthcare interoperability. In keeping with HL7’s vision of a world where access to health data is readily available to everyone whenever and wherever it is needed, FHIR creates connections between different parts of the healthcare system to facilitate the secure, real-time exchange of data and, ultimately, improve patient care.
Since its inception, FHIR has fostered a collaborative culture. HL7 International Chief Executive Officer Charles Jaffe, M.D., Ph.D., recalls, "The development and adoption of FHIR was advanced by a remarkable and committed international community. The impact that FHIR has had on global healthcare was driven by an unprecedented level of collaboration that today continues to grow." Grahame Grieve, principal at Health Intersections, FHIR product director at HL7 and the inventor of FHIR, agrees. “Most people think about FHIR as a technical specification, but I look at it first of all as a community.”
The Da Vinci Project’s Year-End Meeting to Be Held December 8, 2021
The HL7 Da Vinci Project will hold a combined virtual Community Roundtable and Member Forum on December 8 titled "Are You Ready for 2022? Hear Progress and Plans, Available Testing tools and Implementation Perspectives." During this meeting, Da Vinci’s program management office will share insights on the year’s achievements, as well as the latest on strategic planning. They will top it off with a synopsis of Da Vinci’s priorities for 2022.
The agenda includes:
Alliance of government, private sector and philanthropic partners aims to use widely accepted healthcare standard to help advance public health
A new initiative launched by HL7 and jointly supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) seeks to use widely recognized data exchange standards to help advance public health. The effort, called Helios, intends to strengthen the capacity and streamline data sharing across all levels of public health using the HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability (FHIR®) standard.
“Public health has risen in urgency and importance over the last 18 months,” said the ONC’s National Coordinator for Health IT Micky Tripathi, PhD, MPP, “FHIR accelerators have had great success in engaging implementers as early as possible to help identify and overcome longstanding barriers to interoperability. The Helios alliance is a market-based implementation collaboration that will help to ensure FHIR development is coordinated and focused on real world public health needs.”
The initiative is the latest to use HL7’s FHIR Accelerator program, which seeks to speed the development and availability of FHIR to deliver better data that leads to better health outcomes. The Helios alliance represents an ambitious new use of the FHIR Accelerator program, pulling together a diverse group of state, tribal, local, territorial, and Federal public health agencies, private and philanthropic sector partners, and other groups interested in the equitable and effective use of data for the advancement of public health.
HL7's Chief Technology Officer, Wayne Kubick, will retire at the end of this year. We want to take this opportunity to formally announce it and begin recognizing the many accomplishments and contributions he made to the betterment of HL7 International and its entire global community.
Wayne's responsibilities will be assumed by two new C-level officer positions, a Chief Standards Officer and Chief Implementation Officer, and he will remain in an advisory role into early 2022 to support the transition.
We would like to express our deepest appreciation and thank Wayne for his dedication and unparalleled commitment to HL7 International over the past six years. His leadership has been instrumental in advancing HL7’s mission and vision of a world in which everyone can securely access and use the right health data when and where it is needed.
If there is one word that describes Wayne’s work philosophy at HL7, it is Essentialism. He introduced us to the concept when he joined the organization and has been a staunch proponent of incorporating Essentialism across the board, encouraging the organization to focus its efforts on its highest contributions to the industry while letting go of non-essential work.
Weclome to CodeX's New Patient Voices Series!
CodeX recently talked with cancer patients, survivors, and advocates to hear their stories and learn more about their perspective through the cancer care coordination process. CodeX (Common Oncology Data Elements eXtensions) is a HL7 FHIR Accelerator, launched at the end of 2019, that is building a community to enable interoperable cancer data modeling and applications that lead to step-change improvements in cancer patient care and research.
How is the Standard of Care Defined?
“Everyone just said this is the standard of care!” Today, Desiree D. has no evidence of disease, but in 2017 she was diagnosed with stage 2b breast cancer at the age of 40. When trying to make decisions about her course of treatment, Desiree was repeatedly told by doctors that she was getting the standard of care. In reality, the “standard of care” is relatively loose terminology. When making treatment decisions, Desiree felt that the standard of care where she was living in Virginia meant something different than the standard of care in Massachusetts or the standard of care in Vermont.
Imagine if a chef could not make a soup because he only understood Portuguese and the soup’s instructions were in Hindi. The chef could look elsewhere and find a solution after further research; however, the lack of a common language has cost the chef time and the chef’s soup is not going to be the same as he wished. This scenario is harmless, but a similar and much more serious situation exists across healthcare systems. The healthcare industry remains significantly less standardized than other industries. This means that treatments for the same type of cancer might vary greatly by geographic location, cancer center, and even oncologist in part because healthcare data is not collected or shared in a standard manner.
From digital check-ins to connected devices and telehealth programs, patients expect the benefits of a more digitized healthcare experience.
At the same time, they’re also demanding a more personalized approach from healthcare providers. This duality - the need to provide a more convenient experience with one that’s more tailored to the patient - is fueling a wave of technology modernization efforts and the replacement of monolithic legacy IT systems.
With limited re-use outside of the context they were built for and a reliance on nightly batch processing, legacy IT systems fail to deliver the services healthcare IT teams need or provide the experiences patients demand. Modernization should come with a move to microservices that can be used by multiple applications, agile teams that embrace domain driven design principles, and event busses like Kafka to deliver real-time data and functionality to users.
While this transformation is occurring, there’s an 800 lb. gorilla not being widely addressed: Analytics.
What the healthcare industry doesn’t want to talk about is how costly analytics has become; the people, the software, the infrastructure, and particularly how difficult it is to move data in and out of data lakes and warehouses. It's hindering the industry’s ability to deliver insights to patients and providers in a timely and efficient manner.
And yet, so many organizations are modernizing their analytics data warehouses and data lakes with an approach that simply updates the underlying technology. It’s a lift-and-shift effort of tremendous scale and cost, but one that is not addressing the underlying issues preventing the speedy delivery of meaningful insights.
The Da Vinci Project’s October Community Roundtable, to be held Oct. 27 from 4:00 – 5:30 p.m. EDT, will feature Clinical Data Exchange (CDex)
This “Swiss army knife” of implementation guides (IGs) is responsible for identifying, documenting and constraining specific patterns of exchange so that providers and payers can reliably share patient information and coordinate care.
The scope of the CDex encompasses defining combinations of exchange methods with specific payloads, search criteria, conformance, provenance, and other relevant requirements, to support specific exchanges of clinical information between providers and and/or payers. CDex is also responsible for aiding in risk adjustment and quality reporting--and it helps payers to identify whether a requested service is necessary and appropriate.
The roundtable, titled, “Harnessing Clinical Data Exchange (CDex) to Improve Performance within Value-Based Care,” will give a current snapshot of the functionality, benefits and capabilities of CDex, helping providers to share the clinical data they have generated with payers and other industry partners.
At the roundtable, members of the Providence team will share their strategy for using CDex to support payer value-based care arrangements focusing on their initial target to achieve supplemental data exchange.
Presenters will include:
- Viet Nguyen, MD, Technical Director, HL7 Da Vinci Project, and Clinical Informaticist, Stratametrics, LLC
- Semira Singh, Product Manager, Population Health Informatics, Providence
- Michael Westover, Vice President, Population Health Informatics, Providence
Come to the roundtable and learn how HL7 is making progress on CDex, with its eye on what remains to be conquered to provide the fully maximized data exchange needed to support value-based care. The good news is, HL7® Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource (FHIR®) is helping to drive interoperability forward, and Da Vinci is poised to accelerate that data exchange in such a way that it will greatly reduce the burden between providers and payers.