The Standard

An Overview, Demo and Benefits of Da Vinci-related Test Kits on Wednesday, October 23

Are you implementing Health Level Seven (HL7®) Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) APIs and looking for testing resources? Find out about the Inferno Health API Testing Framework at this month’s October HL7 Da Vinci Project Community Roundtable.

This month’s session, Exploring Inferno: An Overview, Demo and Benefits of Da Vinci-related Test Kits, is scheduled for Wednesday, Oct. 23, from 4 – 5:30 PM EDT and features presenters from the Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy (ASTP) / Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) and MITRE. Presenters will introduce the Inferno Framework and voluntary test kits, which may be used as testing tools to further advance implementation guide development and testing of industry implementations.

HL7 applauds the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) for its April 22, 2024 Common Agreement Version 2.0 release, which announced the requirement for health information networks participating in the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA) to support the HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR^®) standard.

By the US Realm Co-Chairs: Brett Marquard, Steve Posnack and Dan Vreeman, DPT

Greetings HL7 community, your US Realm Steering Committee co-chairs come bearing news. For the past few years, we have started to do a “state of the realm” recap for everyone at the January WGM. The full details are available here, but we wanted to celebrate and acknowledge some of 2023’s great work and what’s to come in 2024 through this post as well.

2023

• US Core 6.1.0 and C-CDA Companion Guide R4.1 were published to add USCDI version 3 guidance.
• CDA Web and C-CDA Web were balloted in a common HL7 publication framework.
• US Public Health Library 1.0.0 was published, which represents a domain specific profile library in the US Realm and a foundation for future public health projects.

2024

• US Core will finalize USCDI v4 in May 2024, and then begin v5 design (in the fall).
• C-CDA web publishing, using the FHIR StructureDefinition to support USCDI v4 (now) and then v5 (in the fall).
• Now that ONC’s HTI-1 Final Rule is out and concrete dates are set, the industry transition from US Core 3.1.1 as a baseline to 6.1.0 is upon us. US Realm, in collaboration with other work groups, will be prioritizing its time to focus on supporting this migration. Please engage early and often this year as transition issues pop-up for you.

Background

The Biden-Harris Administration will host the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health on September 28, 2022. In addition to announcing a national strategy to address the intersections between food, hunger, nutrition and health, the Administration has issued a call for stakeholder commitments along five pillars, including the “integration of nutrition and health.”

We seek to better integrate nutrition information within a patient’s electronic health record (EHR) by accelerating a standards-based approach to implementing universal social needs screening. With the final CMS IPPS rule requiring hospitals to report on  social determinants of health (SDOH) screening quality measures in 2024, along with similar requirements of MA SNPs and ACO REACH model participants in 2023, we believe a multi-stakeholder effort, which should also include Medicaid agencies and managed care plans, to advance an HL7 Fast Health Interoperability Resources (“FHIR”)-based approach to meet these “functional” requirements will significantly enhance the ability of providers to meet these CMS requirements.

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.

Recent Initiatives of the ONC’s FHIR at Scale Taskforce (FAST) and Update on Payer-to-Payer Mandate are Key Topics for Wednesday Event, 8/25 at 4:00 pm ET

The success of the HL7® Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource (FHIR®) standard is becoming increasingly evident.

Successful case studies are emerging. For example, a recently published HL7 case study documents how MultiCare Connected Care and Regence are recognizing significant cost savings by using a FHIR implementation guide standard to definitively ascertain that medication reconciliation has been completed. This case study can be found at https://www.hl7.org/participate/case-studies/index.cfm .

But these isolated successes beg the question – can FHIR be used more broadly, and implemented more widely across the country, handling a multiplicity of interactions across dozens of healthcare organizations simultaneously?

That is the task given to the ONC’s FHIR at Scale Taskforce (FAST), which is seeking to determine solutions and opportunities to influence emerging solutions.

Progress by the ONC FAST effort is of prime importance to the dissemination of FHIR solutions to solve information exchange challenges in healthcare. The panel’s progress over the past year will be one of the topics of the Da Vinci Project’s monthly Community Roundtable event, to be held from 4 to 5:30 p.m. ET on Wednesday, August 25.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) released the much-awaited Interoperability & Patient Access Rule in March 2020. The objective is to reinforce this rule by further improving health information exchange and obtaining member health records at a single location to reduce burden on payers, providers and members.

The enforcement date for this rule is January 1, 2023, and will be applicable to Medicaid programs, the Children’s Health Insurance Programs (CHIP) and Qualified Health Plan (QHP) issuers on the individual market Federally Facilitated Exchanges (FFEs). However, it will not be applicable to Medicare Advantage (MA) plans.

The CMS proposed rule will include policies to enhance the current Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) from its interoperability rule such as patient access API and payer to payer API. There are a few new APIs and requirements proposed to improve the overall prior authorization process.

Monthly Event is Scheduled for 4:00 to 5:30 p.m. ET on Wednesday, January 27, 2021

In the first community roundtable of 2021, project managers of the HL7 Da Vinci Project will provide updates for how the project’s implementation guides can be used to solve interoperability challenges and meet federal rules.

The roundtable is intended to highlight how Da Vinci Project implementation guides can help organizations reduce burden, advance data exchange and enable better patient access to data.

Participants from the HL7 Da Vinci Project include Jocelyn Keegan, program manager; Viet Nguyen, MD, technical director; and Vanessa Candelora, project manager. The Da Vinci team will show the progress of Implementation Guides (IGs), which give guidance for using the HL7’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) coding. The team will also provide linkages to specific federal rules and policies, giving you the recipe to solve challenges in alignment with federal rules and leverage the power of standards to improve connectivity across all of your patient populations.

A Closer Look at the 26th Virtual HL7 FHIR Connectathon Held January 13-15, 2021

Despite adjusting almost everything in life to a pandemic-driven “new normal” these past ten months, most of us have discovered a few unexpected benefits from the upheaval. Such is the case for the HL7 FHIR Connectathons, which migrated from in-person to virtual beginning with the May 2020 Connectathon. The January Connectathon #26, occurring last week, carries the distinction of being the largest Connectathon yet – with over 800 participants!

The in-person, face-to-face Connectathons of the past provided a rare (and delightful) opportunity to join developers, implementers, clinicians and interested stakeholders in testing and development of FHIR standards. Moving to the virtual format, however, has allowed more people to participate without having to travel to the event.

What Happens at a FHIR Connectathon?

If you are still fuzzy on the detailed activities of Connectathons—and whether you should attend one, there are many avenues where you can learn more. FHIR Connectathons serve as events that are centered upon developing the FHIR specification; including resources, profiles, and implementation guides (IG). The first Connectathon occurred in September 2012 and readily set the stage for future Connectathons that typically occur in the days ahead of an HL7 Working Group Meeting, thereby encouraging members to participate in both.