HIMSCast: Promoting FHIR Exchange to Improve Prescribing at the VA

When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration wanted to track COVID-19 vaccine deployment, it needed timely and robust information. Wanting the ability to scale, the FDA turned to the next generation exchange in the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources standard, says Jay Nakashima, president of eHealth Exchange.

Retrieving real-time information with an on-demand tool like FHIR, an open standard that enables data exchange with legacy systems, facilitates new workflows such as automated prior authorizations, said Don Woodlock, InterSystems VP of global healthcare solutions.

Since 2020, Nakashima and Woodlock have been working with the FDA’s Project BEST, or Biologics Effectiveness and Safety System – a drug and biologic safety project – on a pilot using FHIR to automate drug adverse event reporting after a drug hits the market has come.

In this episode of HIMSCast, they discuss the first exchange of the FHIR model – an FDA query to the Cedars Sinai health system in September 2022 – and how Veterans Affairs subsequently went live on the proxy service in March 2023 to send veterans notifications about side effects related to biological medicines and vaccinations.

More national use cases for FHIR exchange are possible because the model developed by the nonprofit and its partners is available for other national data exchanges, Nakashima and Woodlock said.

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Discussion points:

• Providers are concerned about FHIR exchange.
• Healthcare sits on a “gold mine” of data and needs to increase providers’ exchanges with payers, public health agencies, and others.
• Government agencies receive real-time data on drug experiences using the model.
• What the FHIR standard still needs to implement at scale.
• TEFCA helps facilitate national FHIR use cases.
• Specific regulations and funding are needed to enable greater FHIR exchange.

More on this topic:

What is the ‘concept car’ for what digital health should be?

How AI and FHIR can help reduce sepsis mortality rates

ONC Chief for the 2024 Interoperability Roadmap

Providence is implementing FHIR to support value-based care

HIMSSCast: Don Rucker’s fresh take on the progress of FHIR, TEFCA and more

What Bulk FHIR can do for quality measurement and more

Andrea Fox is editor-in-chief of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.