The Standard

2023 Accomplishments Position Industry for Year Ahead

Substantial progress has been made this year on HL7 Da Vinci Project Implementation Guides (IGs), which describe how to use HL7’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (HL7 FHIR®) standard for exchanging data to support value-based healthcare and implementations of the guides.

Sizing Up Accomplishments

At the December Da Vinci Community Roundtable, Hans Buitendijk, Da Vinci Project Steering Committee Vice Chair, reviewed progress this year and offered an outlook for 2024.

“We have a number of organizations across the spectrum that have adopted one or more of our [FHIR implementation] capabilities. … That's fantastic in the short number of years that this initiative started to look at what is necessary to make it happen,” Buitendijk said.

“We currently have about eight publishing updates that have been accomplished and quite a few ballot processes that are in flight and being planned for, and there is a good amount of commitment to making this happen. So, we really need to be proud of what we have achieved to date, and particularly in the last year.”

In the year ahead, alignment with emerging regulations, including the final CMS Interoperability Rule, will be a top priority, he pointed out.

Interoperability efforts must go beyond a general set of data to ensure adequate support for public health, research, quality measures and more, he added. “We are all going to impact the ability and the opportunity to share more data over time,” he said.

The key to advancing interoperability by leveraging FHIR, he stressed, is to involve many different parties and develop “the same language where we have a minimum set of capabilities that everybody can support, and leaving room … to grow, to explore, to define new things.”

He also pointed out: “We must continuously raise the bar for what we can exchange and determine what is relevant across many different stakeholders that we should all do in the same way … because the data that we have covered so far is still only a part of the variety of data exchanges that are relevant and can benefit from improvements."

Multistakeholder Discussion Features Panelists from Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Epic, Florida Blue and Providence

Is your organization planning to use FHIR APIs to support data exchange for patient cost transparency (PCT)?

Join us on Wednesday, Sept. 27, from 4:00 – 5:30 p.m. for the September Community Roundtable presentation titled, “No Surprises Now: How the HL7 Da Vinci Project Accelerates Patient Cost Transparency.” Featuring a provider, payer, vendor and regulator, the multistakeholder discussion begins with an initial level setting session outlining the regulatory landscape, including the No Surprises Act, regulations and resources.

Next is a review of the HL7 Da Vinci Project’s PCT use case, which aims to develop a standard data exchange in support of patient cost transparency for devices, services and collection of services using FHIR APIs for exchange of data. The session will close with insights on the benefits of testing and implementation of PCT from the following presenters:

• Vanessa Candelora, HL7 Da Vinci Project Patient Cost Transparency Co-Lead and Senior Consultant, Point-of-Care-Partners
• Tina Mintyala, Program Manager, Revenue Cycle, Providence
• Alice O’Carroll, HL7 Da Vinci Project Patient Cost Transparency Co-Lead and Interoperability Product Manager, Florida Blue
• Carmen Smiley, Health Insurance Specialist, Division of Consumer Protection Policy, Consumer Support Group, Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services
• Zackery Welch, Executive Director, Pre-Services: Providence Health and Services
• Jacob Woodford, HL7 Da Vinci Project Patient Cost Transparency Co-Lead and Technical Services, Epic

The session is moderated by Alix Goss, HL7 Da Vinci Project PMO, and Senior Consultant, Point-of-Care Partners.

Hear about real-world lessons learned on applying the member attribution use case to improve patient matching

In this month’s Community Roundtable, the HL7 Da Vinci Project will offer important use case updates plus a real-world case study on improving patient matching. The virtual roundtable, titled “Use Case Progress and Patient Matching Success: How to Improve Interoperability and Patient Safety,” will be held 4:00 to 5:30 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, March 22.

This informative session will highlight use case milestones for Clinical Data Exchange (CDex), Price Cost Transparency (PCT) and Member Attribution (ATR). Plus, it will offer a case study from Opala and MultiCare Connected Care, implementers of Da Vinci’s member attribution use case. This groundbreaking project resulted in a 10% improvement in patient matching. This benefit helped MultiCare further improve patient safety by ensuring clinicians have the full picture about their patients in real time.

Guest speakers will include:

• Crystal Kallem, project manager, HL7 Da Vinci Project, and senior consultant, Point-of-Care Partners
• Jocelyn Keegan, program manager, HL7 Da Vinci Project, and payer practice lead, Point-of-Care Partners
• Meghan Quint, vice president of solutions and customer success, Opala
• Anna Taylor, AVP, population health and value-based care, MultiCare Connected Care

The moderator will be Alix Goss, HL7 Da Vinci Project PMO, who is vice president and senior consultant at Imprado.

Da Vinci Project's Monthly Meeting to Describe Progress on Price Cost Transparency and Risk Adjustment Initiatives on Wednesday Event, 9/22 at 4:00 pm ET

Important updates on two implementation guide initiatives and a demo of how standards could support prior authorization burden reduction are on the agenda for the next Community Roundtable of the Da Vinci Project.

The roundtable will begin with an update from the project management office of the Da Vinci Project, which will feature updates on the status of the Price Cost Transparency and Risk Adjustment Implementation Guides (IGs). These efforts to use HL7® Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource (FHIR®) are more complex than previous initiatives. Both efforts anticipate challenges that the industry will face to make healthcare costs more transparent and to accurately reflect patients’ comprehensive conditions and risks related to reimbursement for coverage.

After the update, the prior authorization demonstration will show how FHIR IGs can be used to reduce administrative challenge of anticipating prior authorization documentation requirements, a nagging concern within the industry.

Project Achieves a Tipping Point as Adoption Begins in Earnest to Meet Upcoming and Proposed Federal Regulation and Solve Interoperability Challenges

The Da Vinci Project made significant progress in 2020 in advancing the maturity of implementation guides, and now looks to increasingly demonstrate the value of its implementation guides (IGs) across production implementations this year.

Members of the HL7 FHIR® Accelerator group helped push forward work on several implementation guides that were published in 2020, but further refinement lies ahead, said project managers who presented a progress report on the Da Vinci Project at its January Community Roundtable.

In addition to the update on progress with publishing new standards, the presentation offered members a tour of the Da Vinci Project’s enhanced Confluence website, as well as an invitation for more organizations to consider membership to help ensure implementation guides meet the needs of the entire healthcare community.

This year, there will be a growing need to use the HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) standard, as application programming interfaces (APIs) emerge to meet federal information exchange requirements and business needs of value-based care.