Ability Network Launches New FHIR-Based API for Early Adopters

Minneapolis-based health IT company Ability Network has announced the launch of an early adopter program for its new FHIR-based API.

FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) is a draft standard describing interoperable data formats and an API (application program interface) for exchanging health records. As such, Ability partners are now provided with a single interface that connects them to the Ability platform, officials noted. Ability partners include clearinghouses, payers and revenue cycle management companies, and electronic health record (EHR), practice management and other software vendors.

This API technology is architected to support the scale and performance required for high- volume, high-availability applications, while also enabling partner-specific data transformation required for plug-in, legacy applications. It also provides extensibility for future types of interactions as industry standards emerge, officials said.

In this initial program, Ability partners will be able to conduct key eligibility interactions such as member lookup and coverage determination, and key payment interactions such as claim submission, acknowledgment and remittance download with ABILITY’s national payer network using both traditional electronic data interchange (EDI) and FHIR-based formats.

“The industry’s drive to more efficient, quality-based care coupled with the government’s push toward greater and more flexible interoperability is creating new demands for sharing of healthcare information between and among providers, payers and partners,” Geoff Charron, executive vice president of engineering at Ability, said in a statement. “We recognize the inherent complexity in making healthcare systems talk to each other, and this initial release of our public API is a significant first step to making this simpler while providing a path to support new types of information-sharing as standards emerge.”