ONC marks milestone: HRSA receives live data via FHIR
The Health Resources and Services Administration is beginning to use HL7’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources-based application programming interfaces to streamline reporting processes and improve data quality.
Since April 2024, HRSA has received Uniform Data System reports containing anonymized patient-level submissions from health centers representing 2.2 million patients in proof-of-concept FHIR exchange tests, HRSA and the Office of the National Coordinator for Healthcare Technology said in a joint announcement on the ONC blog.
WHY IT MATTERS
HRSA’s Health Center Program staff conducts audits, data extracts, and aggregation in multiple data formats to achieve reporting for UDS+ – a core set of measures that evaluate the quality of a federally funded health center’s operations and performance.
The program funds nearly 1,400 health centers across the U.S. and provides primary care to those in need in all 50 states and territories. While the reporting burden on these health centers has been high, HRSA said better data is needed to ensure that financing delivers affordable, accessible, high-quality and cost-effective primary health care services.
Working with the UDS Test Cooperative, which consists of more than 124 HRSA-funded organizations, ONC’s USCDI+ initiative helped launch one of the first real-world implementations using the Health Level 7 International FHIR Bulk Data Access standard as part of a federal program. according to Steven Posnack, deputy national coordinator for health information technology, and Jim Macrae, associate administrator for primary care at HRSA.
ONC and HRSA have aligned the annual UDS reporting program with FHIR-based APIs available in health IT, certified through the ONC Health IT Certification Program using at-rest APIs – common programming code that allows sending data between one software product and another in digital communications, Posnack and Macrae said in ONC’s HealthITBuzz blogging emphasize the milestone.
The agencies also worked together to create the UDS+ FHIR Implementation Guide on which the exchanges are based.
Posnack and Macrae said the partnership between ONC and HRSA represents the coordination of U.S. Health and Human Services to actively support access to health care in high-needs communities.
By working to modernize data sharing and testing UDS+ FHIR IG requirements, HRSA will gain a “more complete picture of the needs of patients in health centers to best support efforts to improve health outcomes and reduce health disparities to target, in addition to reducing reporting burden on health center beneficiaries,” they said.
“Looking ahead, UDS+ can be used to support even more quality improvement and innovation within the Health Center program,” added Posnack and Macrae.
“ONC and HRSA’s recent announcement that they are using USCDI+ and the Bulk FHIR API to better and more easily analyze data from the broad network of critically important delivery locations that HRSA supports is exciting news,” said Don Rucker, former ONC chief and chief strategy officer at 1UpHealth, said Healthcare IT news on Friday.
“The ability to look at an entire patient population is critical.”
Rucker also said he looks forward to expanding the Bulk FHIR data standards to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Access APIs – to enable data exchange between payer-provider and payer-payer – and seeing the “Veterans Administration HRSA’s example to follow.”
“The USCDI and Bulk FHIR are designed to provide the digital glue for a learning healthcare system and fully calculable accountability for the performance of these providers in a modern big data fashion.”
THE BIG TREND
The second version of ONC’s Health Data, Technology, and Interoperability: Certification Program Updates, Algorithm Transparency and Information rule, HTI-2, is expected to advance FHIR exchange by including new certification provisions for APIs.
Micky Tripathi, national coordinator for healthcare IT, wrote in March that the update, currently in the White House Office of Management and Budget, will focus on use cases such as electronic prior authorization, patient engagement, care management and care coordination.
Sean Sullivan, partner at Alston & Bird, said it could be late June or early July before HTI-2 is released in a recent conversation about interoperability in 2024 because of OMB’s backlog.
ON THE RECORD
“This milestone is a shining example of HHS agencies working together to align and coordinate health IT-related activities to ensure that federal agencies and their partners operate as efficiently and cohesively as possible,” Posnack and Macrae said in the blog.
Andrea Fox is editor-in-chief of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.