The Interoperability Institute has announced availability of Interoperability Land, a simulated healthcare testing environment in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace.
Interoperability Land’s synthetic environment offers developers a platform to develop and test different versions of the standards such as DSTU3, STU3, R4 FHIR or SMART on FHIR applications using application programming interfaces (API) and API sandboxes, according to officials. Organizations, developers, and technology providers can engage in simulated interoperability scenarios to develop, test or demonstrate new application capabilities. It uses completely realistic but synthetic patient data.
For example, organizations can test and validate with simulated patient data using personas to develop an internal solution to adopt existing standards like Blue Button 2.0 or comply with the 21st Century Cures Act and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) proposed rule to improve patient access to healthcare data while minimizing reporting burdens on healthcare providers or payers, according to officials in this week’s announcement.
The Interoperability Institute is a nonprofit subsidiary of the Michigan Health Information Network Shared Services (MiHIN) and aims to provide a neutral space where organizations can collectively demonstrate the interoperability of software as a service (SaaS) solutions.
Indeed, this announcement comes as health organizations await the final rules from CMS and the Office of National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) to implement the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA), that once final will define the interoperability standards required by the 21st Century Cures Act. Interoperability Land will provide organizations the ability to explore how to implement the new rules within their own systems.
AWS Marketplace—a digital catalog with thousands of software listings from independent software vendors that aims to make it easier to find, test, buy, and deploy software that runs on AWS— “has made it easy for organizations to purchase test environments and data packs that house synthetic patients and personas, containing continuity of care documents, admission, discharge and transfer notifications, quality reporting document architecture (HL7 standards) and more,” said Tim Pletcher, DHA, CEO, Interoperability Institute.
“The Interoperability Institute is leveraging AWS Marketplace to help health plans, providers, technology vendors, health information exchanges, public health, and state Medicaid organizations move towards the adoption of the new rules for data sharing and modernization of patient data exchange,” Pletcher added.
Pletcher noted in a recent Healthcare Innovation article that Interoperability Land also features “FHIR Pits,” which are prototype interoperability testbeds specifically dedicated to FHIR, and Rings, which are complete simulated healthcare ecosystems. “A Ring might have a health plan, a major health system, an EHR for a couple of primary care physicians, a pharmacy and it builds out this complete synthetic healthcare systems,” Pletcher explained.
As part of the development of Interoperability Land, several beta users tested the environment and provided critical feedback on the user experience, quality and functionality. One beta user, the Technical Architecture Committee (TAC) for Medicaid Information Technology Architecture (MITA), provided input during the testing phase, but also worked within the platform to develop applications.
“One of MITA’s goals is to integrate systems to advance interoperability, common standards and processes for the Medicaid system,” said Rich Folsom, chief technology officer, MITA TAC. “During the testing phase, we were able to provide input on the product, but even more exciting is we were able to quickly and easily develop applications and application frameworks within the environment and utilize the synthetic data to fully test out the applications we built within the product.”
