AMA, HL7 Partner on FHIR CPT Integration to Drive Interoperability

Health IT developers using Health Level Seven International (HL7) interoperability standards and guides will have increased access to American Medical Association (AMA) medical codes and descriptors through a new partnership.

AMA and HL7 will collaborate to fully integrate Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) with the AMA's Current Procedure Terminology (CPT) code set to advance healthcare interoperability.

"Collaboration with the AMA will provide invaluable opportunities for the communities of developers to seamlessly incorporate this critical terminology within the HL7 development and implementation processes," Charles Jaffe, MD, PhD, HL7 CEO, said in a public statement.

The partnership builds on more than a decade of collaboration between AMA and HL7 to support standardization for health data interoperability.

"As the health system's foundational terminology for coding and describing medical services, CPT is the uniform code set trusted to efficiently exchange data that identifies specific treatments and procedures provided to patients," said James Madara, MD, AMA executive vice president and CEO.

"By working toward greater CPT accessibility for developers, the collaboration between AMA and HL7 allows the use of CPT in the development and testing of FHIR-based technology to further advance the next generation of health information solutions," Madara said. "We also look forward to working more closely with HL7 on educational opportunities and collaborating on industry conferences and events."

Last month, HL7 unveiled HL7 FHIR Release 5 (HL7 FHIR R5), an enhanced and expanded version of its previous standard.

"Release 5 represents the collective progress and implementation experience of the FHIR community," Daniel Vreeman, DPT, HL7 chief standards development officer, said in a press release at the time of the announcement. "With its many incremental updates, this release enables growing capabilities for interoperability in clinical care, public health, and research."

Some of the most notable enhancements include:

• Integrating topic-based subscription capabilities into the core specification enables proactive event notifications in response to data changes within the source system.
• Substantial revisions to the Medication Definition resources, aiming to support better manufacturers, regulators, and their utilization in drug catalogs and pharmacopeias.
• The addition of over a dozen new resources that define structures for various health-related information, bringing the total number of defined resource types to 157.