The Health Resources and Services Administration is beginning to use HL7 Rapid Healthcare Interoperability-based application programming interfaces to streamline reporting and improve data quality.
Since April 2024, HRSA has received Uniform Data System reports with identified patient-level submissions from medical centers representing 2.2 million patients in the trial FHIR exchange proof of concept, HRSA and the Office of the National Coordinating Office for Healthcare Technology said in a report. General announcement on the ONC blog.
WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?
Staff at HRSA’s Medical Center Program perform chart audits, extract and synthesize data in multiple data formats to complete reports for UDS+ – a core set of measures to assess quality Federally funded health center operations and performance.
This program funds nearly 1,400 health centers across the United States and provides primary care to underserved populations in all 50 states and territories. While the reporting burden on these health centers is high, HRSA said it needs better data to ensure funding for affordable primary care services, accessible, high quality and cost-effective.
By partnering with the UDS Testing Cooperative, which includes more than 124 HRSA-funded organizations, ONC’s USCDI+ initiative helped launch one of the first real-world deployments using the Access Control standard. Level 7 International FHIR Bulk Data Access as part of a federal program, according to Steven Posnack, deputy national coordinator for health information technology, and Jim Macrae, deputy administrator for primary care. head at HRSA.
ONC and HRSA have aligned the annual UDS reporting program with FHIR-based APIs available in the certified health IT sector through the ONC Health IT Certification Program using APIs at Rest – commonly used programming code that enables data transfer between one software product and another in digital communications, Posnack and Macrae said in ONC’s HealthITBuzz blog highlights important milestones.
The agencies also collaborated to produce the UDS+ FHIR Implementation Guidance as a basis for exchanges.
Posnack and Macrae said ONC and HRSA’s partnership represents coordination between the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to actively support health care access in underserved communities. high demand.
By modernizing data exchange and examining UDS+FHIR IG requirements, HRSA will have a “more complete picture of the needs of patients at the medical center to best target our efforts.” efforts to improve health outcomes and reduce health disparities, in addition to reducing the reporting burden on health center grantees,” they said.
“In the future, UDS+ can be used to support further quality improvement and innovation in the Health Center Program,” added Posnack and Macrae.
said Don Rucker, former ONC director and chief strategy officer at 1UpHealth Healthcare IT news on Friday.
“The ability to look at the entire patient population is very important.”
Rucker also said he looks forward to expanding bulk FHIR data standards to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Access API – to enable payer-provider and payer data exchange -payer – and see “Veterans Administration follows HRSA’s lead.”
“USCDI and Bulk FHIR are designed to provide digital glue for the learning healthcare system and fully calculable accountability for the performance of these providers in a data-driven way large and modern.”
BIGGER TREND
Second edition of ONC Health Data, Technology and Interoperability: Certification Program Update, Information Rules and Algorithmic Transparency, HTI-2, Expected to Continue Exchange FHIR by including new certification provisions for APIs.
Micky Tripathi, national coordinator for health IT, wrote in March that the update, currently being worked on by the White House Office of Management and Budget, will focus on use cases such as prior authorization. electronics, patient engagement, care management and care coordination.
Sean Sullivan, a partner at Alston & Bird, said it could be late June or early July before HTI-2 is launched in a recent chat about interoperability in 2024 due to the backlog. of OMB.
ON PROFILE
“This important milestone is a prime example of HHS agencies working together to align and coordinate health IT-related activities to ensure that Federal agencies and their partners operate as efficiently and cohesively as possible.”
Andrea Fox is a senior editor at Healthcare IT News.
Email: [email protected]
Healthcare IT News is a publication of HIMSS Media.
