Last week, HL7 held it’s annual plenary meeting in Baltimore at the Hyatt Regency...For the FHIR project, our main attention was the ballot. Across the core standard, and multiple implementation guides, we received >800 detailed comments as part of the ballot. This represents a slight increase over the last ballot, but there was a clear change in the focus of the comments – there was a significant drop in the number of comments relating to the infrastructure, and much more focus on the domain content, and it’s applicability to real world problems. This is a clear marker of the growing maturity of the standard. We continue to expect that we’ll publish FHIR release 3 at the end of this year.
FHIR
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A (Real-World) Tale of 6 Practices and 5 EMRs
We've all been there. Someone in our family (or ourselves) has a medical concern so schedules a primary care visit, gets some images or lab tests, and perhaps learns that surgery is needed. What starts as a fairly simple process can quickly turn into a near-comedy of inefficiency. My own recent story is typical...I invite you to learn how careMESH can take my above experience and make it all digital. We have exceptional knowledge workers in the healthcare industry and had any of the six medical groups in my story asked for a rating of their service, I would have given every one of them a 5 out of 5. They were all excellent, professional, timely, dedicated people and teams. So, let's empower them to communicate.
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AEGIS
AEGIS.net, Inc. (AEGIS) is a CMMI Maturity Level 3 rated, ISO 9001:2008 certified small business and premier provider of Information Technology consulting services to Federal Civilian, Defense and Commercial sector clients. Their domains of expertise include health IT and interoperability, regulatory compliance, finance, human resources, and logistics. Read More »
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API Infrastructure Importance When Providing a Health Service
In my ongoing review of application programming interfaces (APIs) as a technical solution for offering rich and flexible services in health care, I recently ran into two companies who showed as much enthusiasm for their internal technologies behind the APIs as for the APIs themselves. APIs are no longer a novelty in health services, as they were just five years ago. As the field gets crowded, maintenance and performance take on more critical roles in offering a successful business–so let’s see how Orion Health and Mana Health back up their very different offerings...
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Blue Button Developers to Meet at the White House Today - Verma and Liddell to Open the Conference
More than 700 app developers and eHealth groups and organizations have registed to meet today at the White House for the first Blue Button 2.0 developer conference. The "The inaugural Blue Button 2.0 Developer Conference will bring together application developers in the technical community to help build and develop new tools to help patients understand their health data,” said Seema Verma, Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) in a statement.
- The Future Is Open
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careMESH
careMESH is the only service on the market that guarantees 100% digital delivery of patient health information to any clinician nationwide so that healthcare providers and their support teams can communicate and collaborate with each other…instantly. Our secure services, hosted on the Google Cloud Platform© and inclusive of our proprietary FHIR-based National Clinician Directory, make it possible for clinicians and their support teams to locate each other and share digital patient health information, without the burden and expense of complex integration projects. Read More »
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careMESH Launches its HL7 FHIR-Based Provider Directory in the District of Columbia
careMESH, the only service provider to guarantee digital delivery of patient health information to any US-based clinician, today announced that is has implemented its National Provider Directory for users of the DC Health Information Exchange (HIE) in partnership with the Chesapeake Regional Information System for our Patients (CRISP)."We deployed the careMESH directory so that our DC providers would have a central place to locate the most up-to-date information about each other including their preferred communication preferences and digital contact information," said Ryan Bramble, Executive Director for CRISP DC. Read More »
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CMS To Invest $5+ Billion a Year in Open Source and Cloud-based IT Infrastructure for Medicaid
After more than 40 years of relying on monolithic mainframe platforms to administer its services, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has embraced a new modular, open and agile approach to Medicaid health information technology for the Federal government and States. In many ways, this is the best of what open source advocates and technology innovators could have hoped for when it comes to open source policy from a government agency. According to Andrew Slavitt, Acting Administrator of CMS, the agency will spend more than $5 billion a year to fund this transformation.
Consumer Access to Health Care Data: Still a Challenge
Consumers continue to be frustrated with lack of access to their healthcare data, even as wearables and other consumer-targeted devices and services continue to sprout. Recently, ONC launched a Consumer Health Data Aggregator Challenge to spur the development of new applications and partnerships to provide aggregated health data to patients. While the financial “prize” for this effort is meager, recognition by ONC might be the real brass ring. This challenge focuses on the use of FHIR exclusively to support interoperability between systems and present data to consumers. I suspect that applicants will have some trouble meeting the requirements of the challenge effectively, and this is indicative of the broader challenge in supporting this type of data access.
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Global OpenHIE Community to Hold 2019 Conference in Ethiopia
The OpenHIE community will hold its second annual community meeting November 4-8, 2019 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Between 200 and 300 individuals are expected to attend with the ultimate goal of development and efficient and effective operation of national and regional health information exchanges. OpenHIE, short for Open Health Information Exchange, is a global, mission-driven collective dedicated to improving the health of the underserved through open, collaborative development of implementation tools and to supporting country-driven, large-scale health information exchange. Read More »
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Google Joins VistA Team Proposing Open Source EHR for the Department of Defense
Google has thrown its hat into the EHR ring by joining the team led by PwC which is proposing that the Department of Defense (DoD) upgrade their current EHR to Defense Operational Readiness Health System (DORHS), a customized application built for the DoD and based on VistA, the open source EHR developed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)...Google’s participation has enormous implications for both the DoD’s EHR and to the healthcare industry as a whole. By choosing the open source EHR team, Google...has sent a clear message to the world that VistA is the best option for the DoD.
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Grahame Grieve's FHIR report from Baltimore HL7 Meeting
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Halamka Evaluates Blockchain for Health Information Exchange
Yesterday, I read a New York Times article about a possible successor to Bitcoin called Ethereum, which provides a distributed database (no central repository) for the purpose of tracking financial transactions. I immediately thought of the challenge we have turning silos of medical information into a linked, complete, accurate, secure, lifetime medical record. Might blockchain technology be useful in healthcare? I posted the question to my colleagues, Arien Malec (VP, Data Platform and Acquisition Tools at RelayHealth and the new Chair of the HIT Standards Committee) and David McCallie (SVP of Medical Informatics at Cerner).
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Halamka on the ONC Blockchain Challenge
Early this year, I posted a collaborative discussion about the potential applications of Blockchain for healthcare. Ariel Ekblaw from the MIT Media Lab collaborated with Beth Israel Medical Center (BIDMC) to actually implement Blockchain medication reconciliation with deidentified patient data. ONC selected it as a winner of the Blockchain Challenge. The idea is simple. Blockchain was invented to handle financial transactions such as deposits and withdrawls. Medication management is very similar to a bank account. Think of your body as a vault.
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