CommonWell Hosts Connectathon to Test FHIR Discrete Data Exchange

CommonWell Health Alliance hosted a connectathon with 11 of its members to test its Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) services as it works to develop the next generation of FHIR for discrete data exchange.

While CommonWell has been using FHIR for document-based exchange, it is now working to bring discrete FHIR resource exchange to the network.

The pairing of FHIR with the CommonWell Record Locator Service (RLS) is set to give providers the ability to locate FHIR resources for a given patient, including labs, medications, and allergies.  

“FHIR has many important uses in health care data exchange, but what we’re most excited about is to enter the new frontier of using FHIR for discrete data exchange in a secure and scalable way,” said Liz Buckle, director of product of CommonWell Health Alliance.

“We believe the CommonWell RLS is the key to unleashing the true potential of FHIR for discrete data exchange—because it has the power to offer our members the ability to easily find patients and their care locations in a way that they have come to expect,” she added. “This new functionality has the capability to significantly improve provider workflows and the breadth of data that can be exchanged—leading to more informed care and better patient outcomes.”

The two-day virtual event included three tracks.

Track 1: FHIR R4 Document Contribution

This track tested the new FHIR R4 Document Contribution solution, which allows service adopters to respond to document queries using an R4 endpoint. Participants in this track included athenahealth, MEDITECH, Cerner, Cancer Insights, MEDHOST, and WellSky.

Track 2: FHIR Discrete Resource Exchange

The second track leveraged CommonWell as the FHIR directory, including the Master Patient Index (MPI) and RLS.

This track also allowed clients and servers to use CommonWell community certificates to register, authenticate, and get authorization to FHIR servers.

EMR Direct, an accredited Certificate and Registration Authority, issued the certificates and participated as subject matter experts to guide CommonWell members through testing dynamic client registration and authorization using the UDAP Security Implementation Guide.

The UDAP Security IG allowed participants to streamline the registration and authorization process and mitigate manual interaction between FHIR clients and servers.

Participants in track two included MEDITECH, Health Gorilla, MEDHOST, Oprable, Patientory, and Seqster.

Track 3: FHIR Practitioner Directory

Participants tested populating the practitioner directory using a bundle of practitioner and practitioner role resources. Participants included Inovalon and MEDITECH.

“The Alliance is working together to build the next generation of FHIR usage,” said Paul Wilder, executive director of CommonWell Health Alliance. “We want to show that modern, off-the-shelf components, with our record locator as jet fuel, pieced together in a simple yet elegant way, create a massively scalable solution to meet the next phase of interoperability for the healthcare industry.”