At HIMSS23, a new public-private collaboration was launched to promote understanding and effective implementation of the HL7’s Bulk FHIR standard. The coalition of health systems, payers, and government agencies aims to spread insights and spur momentum on Bulk FHIR adoption. Bulk FHIR has the potential to help with an array of healthcare use cases, from population health management to care coordination across payer and provider networks. The hope is that as organizations share feedback and best practices among themselves, other organizations will be better equipped to implement Bulk FHIR successfully.
There was a new public-private collaboration established at the HIMSS23 Interoperability and HIE Forum to provide a greater understanding and more successful application of a crucial interoperability specification. The coalition comprises health systems, payers, and government agencies that will work together to share implementation experiences, best practices, and tips on technical and nontechnical barriers around the use of HL7’s Bulk FHIR standard. Bulk FHIR has the potential to help with an array of healthcare use cases – from population health management to quality measurement, health equity, and care coordination across payer and provider networks.
As these organizations share feedback and best practices among themselves, the hope is to spread insights and spur momentum on Bulk FHIR adoption – helping other organizations with the governance and technological steps needed for successful implementations. Among the ongoing new initiatives cited by the new coalition include an NCQA-organized coalition to evaluate the quality of real-world FHIR Bulk Data in parallel with the forthcoming DAV-FHIR program. DAV-FHIR confers validated status to FHIR data streams if the program requirements are met (i.e. legal access to source data to support primary source verification). Validated streams are then able to be used as standard supplemental data in HEDIS reporting.
Bulk FHIR can help with population health management, quality measurement, health equity, and care coordination across payer and provider networks. The objective is that as more companies use Bulk FHIR, they will be able to share comments and best practices and so accelerate the adoption of Bulk FHIR. This makes it a crucial tool for healthcare organizations.
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, as part of the 21st Century Cures Act Final Rule, added criteria for standardized APIs for patient and population services to its Health IT Certification Program for Bulk FHIR. Electronic health record vendors and other health IT developers who wanted to remain ONC-certified were required to attest to this functionality by the end of 2022.
Former U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra, now president of CareJourney, noted in a blog post that that requirement has led to a profusion of new products that support Bulk FHIR. “As of April 10, there are 250-plus unique products across 200-plus developers that meet this requirement and make this feature available to their customer base,” he said. “Notably, approximately 30% of the certified products indicated that they rely on another vendor’s software to support meeting ONC’s requirement.”
This week, Chopra called on stakeholders across healthcare to participate in this voluntary collaboration as part of industry efforts to meet the growing demand for FHIR-based data sharing.
An update to the 2018 VA Open API pledge to prevent Veteran suicide, to provide more care and benefits to Veterans impacted by toxic exposures, and to support Veterans challenged by social determinants of health (SDOH). An ONC and CDC Foundation-supported network of sites connecting a prototype version of Cumulus to participating Bulk FHIR endpoints to test the instrumentation of USCDI as a data source for public health surveillance and action. An anticipated pilot initiative by the CMS Innovation Center on the use of Bulk FHIR for demographic and SDOH data collection, particularly associated with the ACO REACH Model.
In a session at HIMSS23, former National Coordinator for Health IT Dr. Donald Rucker, along with Dr. Kenneth Mandl of Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, explored how Bulk FHIR can help public and private healthcare organizations of all shapes and sizes better manage their data and track their performance across an array of key metrics. Their discussion, Bulk FHIR: Measuring Global Organizational Performance, explored how healthcare organizations can use Bulk FHIR to improve their data management and performance tracking capabilities.
