Accenture, Surescripts Join HL7's Argonaut Project

Two more health IT companies have joined nonprofit standards development organization Health Level Seven International's (HL7) Argonaut project.

Accenture, a New York-based company that integrates electronic health record (EHR) systems, and Surescripts, an Arlington, Va.-based company that operates an electronic prescribing (ePrescribing) network, are the latest to collaborate with HL7 on the development of the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standards framework. The Argonaut Project was launched in December of 2014. In a few short months, HL7 has recruited many of the biggest healthcare organizations to develop FHIR, which is a RESTful application programming interface (API). HL7 representatives say this is modern, flexible approach. 

The list of founding members of Argonaut include:

·        athenahealth

·        Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center

·        Cerner

·        Epic

·        Intermountain Healthcare

·        Mayo Clinic

·        MEDITECH

·        McKesson

·        Partners HealthCare System

·        SMART at the Boston Children’s Hospital Informatics Program

·        The Advisory Board Company

“We are delighted that the Argonaut Project has garnered so much industry interest in accelerating the development of HL7 FHR and OAuth security. The addition of Accenture and Surescripts broadens the collaborative efforts of the Argonaut Project members to help bring a mature and quality standard to healthcare IT," Micky Tripathi, chief executive officer and president of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative and Argonaut project manager, said in a statement. “The more testing we conduct and implementation experiences we collect, the faster we will see RESTful API-based transactions become a day-to-day reality in health information exchange.”