Patient Access on FHIR!

The Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) has published their final “Interoperability and Patient Access Proposed Rule” that intends to “move the health care ecosystem in the direction of interoperability” and to “signal [our] commitment to the vision set out in the 21st Century Cures Act and Executive Order 13813 to improve the quality and accessibility of information that Americans need to make informed health care decisions, including data about health care prices and outcomes, while minimizing reporting burdens on affected health care providers and payers.”

This rule comes with a pretty aggressive schedule of interoperability mandates starting this fall with the registration of digital contact information (including a FHIR API endpoint) and the implementation of a modern admit, discharge and transfer (ADT) event notification scheme as well as a comprehensive attestation to a number of Promoting Interoperability Program requirements.

While Covid19 has us all physically socially distant, we can still use this historic moment to come together in a shared virtual space to digress deeply into these unique interoperability requirements and suss out exactly where the pain points are for eligible clinicians, hospitals, and critical access hospitals (CAHs).

Group organizer David Vaccaro will make a concise summary presentation of the CMS rules emphasizing the immediate 2020 requirements, detail several technical considerations relating to Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) and the ADT event notification scheme and then open the discussion up to the group to in order to gain a broader sense of how our group members have been planning for their organizations and to share experiences they have been having in the field.