The Standard

Health Level Seven (HL7^®) drives the standards upon which electronic Clinical Quality Measures (eCQMs) sit, so participation in these venues is crucial. The HL7 community already has a lot of technical input but lacks input from the clinical side – either from clinicians or clinical informaticists. There is a gap between the clinical intent of quality measures and the technical standard, but clinical informatics experts can help bridge this gap by contributing to the conversation and development of the HL7 standards and resources.

Measure development, as we know it, is changing. Quality improvement is important to keeping healthcare costs affordable and patients safe; however, it should not come as a huge burden to clinicians. Goals of electronic Clinical Quality Measures (eCQMs) include reducing the burden of manual abstraction and reporting for provider organizations, as well as fostering the goal of access to real-time data for bedside quality improvement and clinical decision support. We want to hit the “sweet spot” as depicted in this diagram:

WHY STANDARDS?

On July 30, as part of the second Blue Button Developers Conference at the White House, a broad coalition of health systems, health plans, and other health IT stakeholders committed to real-world testing of the soon to be published  HL7® FHIR® Bulk Data implementation guide (IG). 

The announcement was made on stage by HL7 International CEO Dr. Charles Jaffe, later joined by Steven Posnack from ONC and Dr. Shafiq Rab of Rush University System for Health. More than 20 early adopters who have committed to advance this important use of HL7 FHIR were identified.

Much of the focus around HL7 FHIR APIs to date has involved  transactions representing  a single patient. While those use cases are important, especially for patients desiring more seamless access to their data via their smartphones, the FHIR Bulk Data Implementation Guide (IG) unleashes FHIR’s potential to revolutionize population health by enabling new services powered by big data. The standardized approach offered by the Bulk Data IG is being used by CMS in its new Data at the Point of Care (DPC) pilot and could help transform the ways healthcare providers and health plans share data for quality improvement and cost accountability.

The Bulk Data IG is the result of a two-year effort funded by ONC’s cooperative agreement with HL7 in partnership with the SMART team at Boston Children’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School.

The following organizations will participate in real-world testing of the HL7 FHIR Bulk Data IG, and Steven noted ONC’s willingness to support these organizations. Participants will collaborate on providing a common set of artifacts, tools and services with an aim to lower standards implementation costs by making them as reusable and transferable as practicable.

Committed organizations include:

Signed,

Charles Jaffe, MD, PhD
HL7 International CEO 

Steven Posnack, MS, MHS
Executive Director, Office of Technology, ONC

WASHINGTON – Today a group of technology leaders from Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and Salesforce came together at the CMS Blue Button 2.0 Developer Conference to reaffirm a commitment to interoperability made one year ago, and to share progress and plans to move decisively forward on this pledge.

HL7 International offers a wide range of certification options for its products. The purpose of these certifications is to ensure the quality of the workforce implementing HL7's standards.

Join Our Webinar on May 22, 2019 at 12 pm Central!

API 101: An Introduction to APIs and How They Are Transforming Health IT

Webinar speakers and blog authors:

Wayne Kubick, HL7 CTO
John Orosco, CTO, Sansoro Health
Dave Levin, CMO, Sansoro Health

Application program interface (API) technology has transformed the digital economy and is now poised to do the same in health IT. The combination of the an increasingly robust HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) standard API and the rules proposed by ONC on interoperability will accelerate this trend. What should you know before diving in? Tune in to our live webinar on Wednesday May 22 at 12pm CT.

 APIs allow software applications to connect, communicate and collaborate through a combination of web services. This harnesses the power of internet “backbone” communication protocols to provide a secure channel for connecting two applications and standards like JSON and XML that provide data-interchange formats or “objects.”

APIs also allow businesses to collaborate more seamlessly. For example, businesses that ship packages via UPS can leverage the UPS API to easily track shipping status. This API hides the complexity of the UPS database and business logic. It’s an open API that is exposed to the world so almost anyone can use it. Simply register, learn how the API works and connect and your system can interrogate the UPS API, instantly retrieve the current status, and display it to your customers on your website or app.

Did you know HL7 offers certification and proficiency exams for its healthcare information technology standards?

Our ongoing tooling journey at HL7 continues, neither as a sprint nor a marathon.  For us, it’s really more like an odyssey – an ongoing journey where there is always something more to be done, another path to explore, and a final destination (retirement, for example) seems far out of reach.  In the case of HL7 tooling, a fair number of tooling retirements are well overdue.   

Despite the wait, it’s gratifying to see when tangible progress is actually achieved. On the Confluence front, we’re in the home stretch of phase 1 of the rollout, though there’s a whole new course to pursue just around the bend.  We now have all work groups on Confluence (!) and have also migrated many more projects, committees and collaborations. New functions and help features in Confluence (including a major facelift for confluence.hl7.org) are being added regularly, and you can keep up with these by checking the CTO Tooling Update page. This enabling platform is already unleashing many new opportunities within the HL7 community. Our next target is to work toward optimizing our processes with online forms and workflow. The online project scope statement (PSS) pilot is now available and will give us an opportunity to speed up reviews and approvals as well as make new projects more visible to the community in the hope we can avoid last minute catchups.