Carequality is seeking input from the healthcare community as it looks to add support for FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource)-based exchange.
According to an announcement from Carequality—national-level, consensus-built, common interoperability framework to enable exchange between and among health data sharing networks—member and non-member stakeholders from across the healthcare continuum are encouraged to participate in the new FHIR Implementation Guide technical and/or policy workgroups. The former will concentrate more on specifications and security, while the latter will focus on the “rules of the road,” officials said.
With much of the healthcare industry either starting to implement FHIR at some level, or planning to do so, the Carequality community is thinking ahead to the type of broad, nationwide deployments that Carequality governance can enable, officials noted.
The new policy and technical workgroups are expected to work in concert with many other organizations contributing to the maturity and development of FHIR, and officials attest that the workgroups will not duplicate the work that is underway on multiple fronts, including defining FHIR resource specs and associated use case workflows. Instead, the workgroups will focus on the operational and policy elements needed to support the use of these resources across an organized ecosystem.
“Carequality has demonstrated the power of a nationwide governance framework in connecting health IT networks and services for clinical document exchange,” said Dave Cassel, executive director of Carequality. “We believe that the FHIR exchange community will ultimately encounter some similar challenges to those that Carequality has helped to address with document exchange, and likely some new ones as well. We’re eager to engage with stakeholders to map out the details of FHIR-based exchange under Carequality’s governance model.”
Cassel added, “We believe that adoption of FHIR in the Carequality Interoperability Framework can advance all of these goals by improving the availability of useable clinical information, expanding the scope of exchange, and significantly lowering the costs of participating in interoperable exchange.”
In August, Carequality and CommonWell, an association providing a vendor-neutral platform and interoperability services for its members, announced they had started a limited roll-out of live bidirectional data sharing with an initial set of CommonWell members and providers and other Carequality Interoperability Framework adopters.
