The Standard

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.  

HL7's Commitment to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

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.”

Three use cases will be in the spotlight as the HL7 Da Vinci Project hosts its regular monthly community roundtable from 4:00 to 5:30 p.m. ET on Wednesday, May 27.

The session will demonstrate how organizations are using the Da Vinci Project implementation guides to streamline the exchange of information between payers and providers.

The event, “Learn How Cambia Health Solutions, HealthSparq and United are Using Da Vinci Specifications to Advance Value-Based Care,” will look at ways that HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) can be used to achieve quality measurement, provider search and lab results integration into EMRs.

Due to COVID-19, most of the in-person conferences have been changed to virtual events. I recently attended my first-ever fully online technology conference, the Virtual HL7 FHIR Connectathon. This article details my experience and recommendations, in general, for all future conferences post-COVID-19.

Introduction

First, let me give my kudos to HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) Product Director Grahame Grieve, the planning team, track leads, FHIR community and HL7 for the  excellent execution of  the Virtual FHIR Connectathon. The conference includes healthcare data interoperability topics with different tracks, expertise and both technical non-technical skills.

I have attended many in-person conferences in the past. Over time, I realized people attend conferences for primarily for two reasons:

1. Learning new skills
2. Networking

Let me share my thoughts based on my first Virtual FHIR Connectathon experience.