The Standard

Recap of the August Da Vinci Project Community Roundtable on DRLS and FAST

As the HL7 Da Vinci Project continues to make rapid progress in developing use cases to enable the exchange of healthcare information, work has been underway to test and widely deploy these cases among industry players.

Efforts led by federal agencies have been in motion to use solutions based on HL7’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) standard at scale, as well as to incorporate FHIR use cases in a federal initiative that developed and tested a prototype to demonstrate the capability to streamline clinical workflow access to coverage requirements.

Presenters at a Da Vinci Project community roundtable on August 26 said the initiatives are important in bringing the benefits of automated information exchange throughout the healthcare industry, while taking steps to reduce the burden on providers.

The FAST Initiative
In one initiative, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) is convening a FHIR at Scale Taskforce (FAST) that brings together a representative group of motivated healthcare industry stakeholders. FAST aims to take use cases that are being demonstrated in initial efforts between partners in the industry and ensure that they can operate more broadly.

“In building solutions for FHIR for interoperability, we realize that individual solutions are being developed to work between one endpoint and another,” said Stephen Konya, senior advisor to ONC and the Department of Health and Human Services. “When we start to roll these out at scale – when there’s a large number of payers sharing a large amount of data with a large number of providers – the game changes.”

Providence St. Joseph, Cambia and MultiCare to Present on Collaborative Effort to Implement Use Case from the HL7 Da Vinci Project on Wednesday, September 23

Clinicians see the need for better access to healthcare information as clearly as others serving in the industry. Because of that, it should be no surprise that clinicians and their teams are playing key roles in the HL7 Da Vinci Project implementations.

Clinicians are not insulated from the changes being wrought by value-based care, so they see the need for adaptations to the digital health ecosystem. That is one force driving change at Providence St. Joseph, which is working with Cambia Health Solutions and MultiCare Connected Care to facilitate information exchange.

These organizations are collaborating on an initiative that is helping lead the way with Da Vinci Project production implementations to enable interoperability and advance value-based care. They will share their insights and experiences next week during the Da Vinci Project’s monthly Community Roundtable from 4:00 – 5:30 pm ET on Wednesday, September 23. The roundtable is entitled “Provider Leadership and Partnerships: The Key to Interoperability and Scalability of Value-Based Care.”

Community Roundtable scheduled for August 26 will detail progress toward DRLS and FAST

The HL7 Da Vinci Project’s August Community Roundtable features updates on two initiatives that leverage healthcare industry collaborative efforts to advance information exchange using HL7® Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®).

This is in response to two federal agencies that are seeking to maximize efficiency at scale and overcome barriers and physician burden in the healthcare system.

The agencies – the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC)– will provide updates on the progress on these efforts during the August 26 Community Roundtable.

The federal agency efforts aim to build on collaborative efforts underway in the healthcare industry, which are at the heart of the work by the HL7 Da Vinci Project, an accelerator seeking to advance the use of FHIR standards in support of value-based care initiatives.

The CMS Center for Program Integrity began the Documentation Requirement Lookup Service (DRLS) initiative in 2018, working in collaboration with the healthcare industry, in to response to ongoing provider burden experienced when trying to identify coverage-related documentation requirements, including those for prior authorization.

The Virtual FHIR Patient Access API Implementation Event Scheduled for  August 17-19

The start of the New Year will see healthcare organizations facing new requirements for using application programming interfaces (API) to facilitate the sharing of healthcare information.

That’s made clear by the recent release of final rules by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), which will be the first step in enabling data access.

To help support healthcare organizations in this shift, HL7 is holding the virtual FHIR Patient Access API Implementation event next week. With the impending final rule and the looming implementation deadline, this event will be narrowly focused on the requirements for patient access APIs by payers.

The goals for this Implementation-a-thon and associated educational events are to inform the broader community of the work HL7 FHIR Accelerators have done to lay the groundwork for meeting the final rules; and to help participants prepare for the September HL7 FHIR Connectathon and 34^th Annual Plenary & Working Group Meeting.

Education and specific planning in API implementation in a FHIR environment will be important for the industry, as these recently released federal rules require that consumers be able to access their medical information through third-party apps, and that will place pressure on healthcare organizations to develop APIs to enable this access. The HL7 Da Vinci Project continues to develop use cases that will facilitate this patient access to information.

Recap of the July Session of the HL7 Da Vinci Community Roundtable

Joint project involves Rush Health, Cigna and InterSystems to use HL7 FHIR Resources to coordinate on three quality measures.

The healthcare industry increasingly has long recognized the importance of data measurement in improving healthcare quality. But it’s not enough for organizations to gather and hoard data – it needs to be shared between providers and payers.

Data sharing, as instantaneously as possible, has become more important as payers and providers collaborate in accountable care organizations and other arrangements that incentivize improving patient outcomes. To date, the exchange of information has been labor intensive, but the use of emerging data exchange standards is enabling more precise data exchange when and where provider teams need it.

Efforts to improve data exchange on quality measures are underway in a collaboration between Cigna, healthcare technology vendor InterSystems and Rush Health, a clinically integrated network of healthcare providers and hospitals in the Chicago area. The partners are using the HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) standard to support the initiative.

Representatives from the partnering organizations described their efforts to date at a Community Roundtable hosted by the HL7 Da Vinci Project on Wednesday, July 22. While FHIR connectivity had not been implemented in live production systems as of that date, the organizations had tested functionality in a non-production environment and continue to work, committing to regular meetings and consistent communication on the project until the scheduled go-live.

Recap of the June Session of the HL7 Da Vinci Community Roundtable

The HL7 Da Vinci Community Roundtable held June 24, showcased work that is continuing on applications that can seamlessly deliver healthcare data to consumers using application programming interfaces (APIs) to pull data from payers’ information systems.

The pressure is on to deliver the functionality, and soon. Final rules from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) will require payers to make claims payment data and other patient or member clinical information available to consumers with no obstacles, ideally through simple apps that query for, gather and organize the data in meaningful ways that create value for the user.

HHS rules require HL7’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) standard to be used to support this process, and application vendors have already deployed products that are being used by consumers. Three such app developers demonstrated how their applications work using payer-based data and described the underlying technology at the community roundtable.

CMS Final Rule & Da Vinci Implementation Guides

The final rules call for payers to provide healthcare data to members through the use of FHIR-based APIs, as well as using a similar methodology to make provider directories available to patients. The CMS rules require that CMS-regulated payers allow patients to easily access their claims and encounter information, including cost, as well as a defined subset of their clinical information through third-party app developers of their choice, as long as that data is being maintained by the payer organization.  The CMS implementation resources for pending rules mentions a number of implementation guides developed by the Da Vinci Project to meet the regulations: Payer Data Exchange: Provider Directory (Plan-Net) to share details on available providers and pharmacies for a particular plan design, Payer Data Exchange for payers to share clinical data, and access to clear formulary information to support patient choice capabilities regarding prescription drugs and potential purchasing alternatives through Payer Data Exchange: Formulary.

I like to describe the solutions that the HL7 Da Vinci Project and the other HL7 FHIR accelerator programs are creating to build something useful and large out of LEGO blocks.

In the Da Vinci initiative, a cadre of talented technical experts have worked since September 2018 to take the pieces of HL7 FHIR coding and adapt them to real-world solutions that reflect the demands for bi-directional information exchange in support of value-based care arrangements.

Currently, members from 49 organizations are working on a range of use cases that will serve as blueprints for how to address vexing problems in data exchange that must be solved for the nation’s healthcare system to become more efficient.

In one such instance, a payer and three provider organizations in the Pacific Northwest are partnering on a new data-sharing approach. The initiative will use Da Vinci use cases for medication reconciliation and develop an implementation guide that will provide a standard, consistent approach that employs FHIR, to enable easy exchange of data between the providers and the payer.

HL7 Da Vinci Project Event Wednesday, July 22, from 4:00 – 5:30 p.m. EDT

Quality measurement is a key factor in improving the delivery of care, especially in value-based care arrangements. And it has become clear that as the shift to value-based care continues, the need for payer-provider collaboration has become essential.

The exchange of data among healthcare industry members can help organizations improve quality, and HL7’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) can play a significant role. The next Community Roundtable hosted by the HL7 Da Vinci Project entitled “What It Takes: How to Leverage the HL7 Da Vinci Project to Drive Quality Measurement and Value-Based Care,” will examine how organizations are making progress in sharing information for quality purposes.

The roundtable discussion will begin with Jocelyn Keegan, the Da Vinci program manager, providing an overview on the status, maturity and resources available for emerging implementations across Da Vinci focus areas.

Report from Virtual FHIR DevDays 2020 on HL7 Da Vinci Project Use Cases

Developers are fine-tuning ways to use the HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource (FHIR) standard to reduce communication challenges and decision impediments between providers and payers.

Working on use cases involving coverage and burden reduction, the HL7 Da Vinci Project is refining early versions of standards and developing implementation guides for value based care (VBC). Speaking to more than 150 attendees during the virtual HL7 FHIR DevDays event, Dr. Viet Nguyen, Da Vinci Project Technical Director, noted that the coverage and burden reduction use cases are intended to address workflows around provider-payer interactions. FHIR implementation guides are then created based on a set of use cases. 

Coverage Requirements Discovery

One use case, Coverage Requirements Discovery, gives providers real-time access to payer approval requirements, documentation and rules at point of service to reduce provider burden and support treatment planning. In its essence, this would answer a provider’s question about whether a procedure or treatment needs a prior authorization from a payer. The aim is to use CDS Hooks to supply an answer to a clinician posing the request within his or her workflow. Work is continuing on developing an implementation guide for this use case.

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.