Going to ask again about HealWell - they are on an acquisition tear and seem to be very AI-focused. Has…
Summary of ONC Interoperability in Action Day
Digital health updates are written by LoneArranger, an anonymous industry insider.
On Monday, March 20, the ONC held an Interoperability in Action session featuring a day of presentations from participants in a number of their innovation challenges as well as a few presentations by ONC staff. Many of the presentations covered applications that utilize FHIR resources to support discrete data exchange.
Patient Data Aggregator App Challenge
Two Patient Data Aggregator App Challenge winners were presented, including MyLinks (PatientLink Enterprises) and Green Circle Health. The MyLinks application uses cloud technology, FHIR, and secure messaging to help patients gather data, participate in research, access information Direct remotely, and engage with interactive tools.
Green Circle Health uses FHIR to power an integrated patient health data dashboard, allowing users to gather information from wearables and other Internet of Things Devices as well as schedule health reminders through a single interface.
Provider Experience Challenge
Two Provider User Experience Challenge winners also gave presentations, including Herald Health and a collaboration of Duke Health, Intermountain Healthcare, and University of Utah. The Herald Health application allows users to manage EHR alerts and alarms. The system offers the ability to create customizable push notifications that can be tailored to personalized preferences and the priorities of specific patient groups. It is currently live at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and will be implemented at Boston Children’s in the near future. The application uses SMART on FHIR integrations with Cerner and generates alerts based on rules driven by test results and other data.
The Duke Health / Intermountain / University of Utah collaboration has produced a clinical decision support tool for detecting and treating infants with jaundice. Their Bilirubin app is in production in the Epic system at the University of Utah and also available in the CareWeb EHR. They are updating it to the CDS Hooks specification in the future.
Move Health Data Forward Challenge
Five groups that were selected as Phase 2 prototype winners presented during the Move Health Data Forward Challenge session. The focus of this initiative is to promote the development of solutions to authorize movement of data by patients. They included CedarBridge Group, EMR Direct, Docket, Live and Leave Well, and the Lush Group. The next phase is the test these solutions in “real life,” with submissions due by May 1 and two finalists to be selected by May 31.
CareApprove: Cedarbridge Group
A patient-mediated solution for sharing information between providers based on a Javascript platform and uses the IHE MHD profile and FHIR for clinical data exchange. Patients have a mobile app to review and approve each transaction, authorizing providers to exchange records between their EHRs. They can also limit the amount of information that is exchanged by category if desired.
This presentation highlighted that there are too many different portals for patients to access, resulting in “portalitis.” However, APIs and FHIR offer potential opportunities to solve this issue. Based on HEART profiles and UMA, it allows patients to authorize access to their records. It is also soon to be Direct secure messaging enabled.
Foxwall Wythe: Docket
This is an augmented patient intake application which includes a superset of patient intake templates that are questionnaire based and can be tailored to meet the needs of specific provider practices. It uses a “Boarding Pass” tool to load information on providers and includes appointment check-in capability and appointment cards, and generates reminders and alerts. Fitbit and other wearable data can be automatically linked via Bluetooth and the Apple Health app and providers can suppress information they don’t need.
This tool provides access to trusted end-of-life medical documents when and where needed via secure access and sharing and includes a mobile app. Their focus is on people at end of life and also people who want to ensure access to appropriate care in the event of hospitalization. The tool includes the ability to create and share documents online and maintains a to-do list of pending actions and shows the status of the completeness of information. It leverages the HEART profile to connect providers and patients, provides personalized guides based on patient values, and allows providers to invite their patients to sign up. They are looking to partner with emergency medical providers and geriatric providers.
This tool is based on FHIR and HEART standards and allows patients to access and share health data securely. It is focused on patient mediated information sharing where patients control all aspects of the process. Policies are created by the patient for each provider and they can limit timeframe when data is shared. Transactions leverage an authorization server using Google IDP but it can use other methods as the industry evolves. Data can be imported by patient from a FHIR enabled portal which enables patients to start using the app immediately.
Med List Project
During the afternoon, the program shifted to presentations addressing the Med List Project, with over 150 vendors, providers, and other organizations involved. The focus is on interoperable medication lists using FHIR-based APIs. Demos were conducted at the Connected Health Conference in December and at HIMSS in February.
MediSafe: This tool provides medications adherence reminders and notifications and also provides patient education. It has over 3.5 million registered users and is integrated with Google Fit.
CareEvolution: Offers a medication list summary and identifies therapeutic alternatives that may be less expensive. It reviews discount card opportunities for medications for cash payments and also looks at medications eligible for patient assistance payments.
MyFHR: An untethered version of the cFHR platform, which aggregates data from multiple sources. It is FHIR based and provides access to medication data and other information from other sources.
Cedars Sinai and Epic: An implementation at Cedars Sinai using Epic. There is an issue of FHIR resource maturity (production ready). Epic supports 16 resources with read capability. It will support write capability and CDS Hooks in the near future. A provider gave a demo of access to multiple sources of medication data and a presentation in a mobile app via interfaces with Epic MyChart.
Hackensack Medical Center: They have created an app using API-based tools built on Epic API framework and integrated with HealthKit. It uses biometric identification to access and share data with other providers. Using an API management layer, it allows integration with trusted vendors and partners using tokens. They demonstrated a method for exchanging medication data between different organizations.
Trinity Health: They have created a virtual pill box of medication reminders utilizing data from many EHRs across their organization including Cerner, Epic, Athena, Care Evolution, and NextGen. They maintain their own MyID Care consumer ID store and a data lake for patient-generated information and leverage Cerner mPages for providers. There is a mobile app for the patient with access to medications and other information.
NY Columbia Presbyterian: They have developed a medication reconciliation app based on the HL7 Argonaut FHIR specifications. They leveraged their CSC integration engine and the Allscripts EHR sandbox to enable the integration. The system is connected with other systems at Weill Cornell Medicine, which uses Epic. They are using the MyFHR app for consumer access and can present an integrated medication list across multiple facilities.
High-Impact Pilots
The next session covered the High-Impact Pilots which last for one year, with about six months left to go. The categories include:
- Comprehensive medication management
- Care coordination
- Lab results
- Self-identified topics
Four awards were given to:
- Health Collaborative: Patient-centered data home
- Lantana Consulting Group: pharmacist care plan
- RxRevu: prescription decision support
- Utah Health: closed loop surgical referrals
Health Collaborative: Their approach routes data between HIEs based on the patient home address. This Heartland Pilot includes seven HIEs in the Midwest. Safety, privacy and security, and interoperable exchange were the areas of focus. They are using IHE cross-gateway profiles and HL7 ADT and CDA standards and VPNs and web services for connectivity.
Lantana: They are working with Community Care of North Carolina and six pharmacy organizations on a pharmacy care plan use case based on the C-CDA on FHIR specification. They have created bi-directional transforms to convert between the HL7 CDA care plan and CDA on FHIR care plan formats. They will update to STU 3 when completed and the transforms for CDA on FHIR when updated. Their system can also convert to JSON format.
RxRevu: This presentation covered prescription decision support tools at Banner Health via a SMART on FHIR integration using their RxCheck platform. The focus is on consistent prescribing, optimized spend, and patent safety. Leveraging Cerner Ignite APIs and the Cerner Millennium EHR, they concentrate on Medicare Blue Advantage members at Banner Health to provide a medication reference with therapeutic alternatives and medication reconciliation and adherence tools. Clinical quality, cost efficiency, and interoperable exchange were the primary areas of focus.
Utah Health: This initiative involves closed loop surgical referrals based on a SMART on FHIR dashboard within the Epic EHR. It is also deployed at Intermountain using Cerner. It includes care coordination and closed loop referrals with a focus on clinical quality, cost efficiency, and practice efficiency. While developing the dashboard, they interviewed end users, including PCPs and surgeons, and conducted a usability session. Referral requests initiate the workflow, which includes a visual timeline of the status of activities related to the procedure and hospitalization. The tool also provides follow-up guidance to the PCP after the procedure. It is based on the FHIR US Core Encounter and Care Plan resources.
Standards Exploration Awards (SEA Program)
The next session covered winners in the SEA program including Arkansas SHARE, Cincinnati Children’s, and SysBioChem.
Arkansas SHARE: The State Health Alliance for Record Exchange is a statewide HIE in Arkansas. The focus of the program is on bi-directional integration of behavioral and physical health records. Using role-based access, it leverages XDS.b exchange standards and the HL7 C-CDA document standards. HISP secure messaging and a virtual health record portal are used by most behavioral health users across 10 hospitals and 133 clinics that lack integration capabilities. They are planning to survey providers after the pilot to evaluate outcomes and user experiences. Barriers included the cost of a Netsmart module to connect to SHARE, lack of IT knowledge, and concern about duplicated expenses.
Cincinnati Children’s CCHCP: The biomedical informatics department was challenged by case review forms for clinical trials, which are created manually now. Their focus was on cost efficient pre-population of eCRFs to reduce manual data entry. They retrieve the form for data capture (RFD) using FHIR web services to capture common data elements and populate the forms. This will ultimately be deployed to production, but they are expecting validation challenges with FHIR.
SysBioChem: The purpose of this initiative is to make family health history available to drive better risk predictions for clinical care. There is a problem with lack of standardization and a need to harmonize different approaches. The focus was on building a minimal viable product initially. They use an interoperable message based on FHIR resources across many data silos include lab, EHR, family health history, genomics, and others. MGH/Dana Farber and Intermountain Healthcare are involved in the project. They use the Hughes Risk Module Analytics Module and make a round trip to get a risk profile from the analytics module using FHIR and HL7 V3 conversion. They are building a harness to submit large data sets from IMH and hoping to consume 3,000 patient family histories during the project. They also identified the need to create a US realm profile for family health history Their architecture is housed in AWS.
Blockchain in Healthcare
The last session of the day covered the recent Blockchain in Healthcare code-a-thon event and presentations from the top performers. All of these applications were created in 24 hours or less.
Team TMI: Trust My Identity is an approach for provider identity credentialing based on Identity Management and APIs. Inaccurate information and limited sharing between institutions creates a lengthy and laborious credentialing process which is cumbersome with lots of duplication of effort. The technology is based on IPFS, Monax Blockchain, and BigChain DB (noSQL DB). The provider creates a profile and launches the process. A payer then certifies their network affiliation and board credentials reviewed and approved. In the future, they feel distributed provider directories should include blockchain since significant cost savings can be achieved.
Nucleus Health: Project Health Genesis involves identity management and medical record sharing for images. Cloud-based medical imaging systems are growing, which affords the opportunity to use an approach based on blockchain. They demonstrated a provider to patient sharing use case. ID Management is via Ethereum, authentication is done with digital signatures and they use Smart Contracts for authorizations. DICOM Web requests are made to a VNA and the patient can then retrieve and view images. The code is available on GitHub – Open source, and a complete Docker container system was built to support the test implementation.
Health Passport: This group won the ONC Blockchain code-a-thon with a patient-centered health record system involving patient identity verification and medical record sharing. Either MetaMask or uPort identity management can be used with a QR code used to access information and this approach can also integrate wearables data. Transactions currently take many seconds to complete with Ethereum taking 14 seconds to respond due to the distributed block confirmations required. The objective is to get it down to three seconds per block in the near future, but the speaker cautioned that the industry still needs to be cautious about the privacy aspects.
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Hi – thank you for covering the ONC Interop Day! I am offering edits to clarify the Medlist demo portion of the day:
The functionality labeled as CareEvolution belongs to MediSafe.
MyFHR is the personal health record application offered by CareEvolution. CareEvolution myFHR (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/my-family-health-record/id1148158205?mt=8) is an an untethered version of the CareEvolution personal health record. This mobile application allows consumers to connect to multiple care provider portals, view their aggregated medical record including medlist for themselves plus those they are caregivers for, and record over the counter medications. The app is FHIR based.
Cedars Sinai and NY Presby each demonstrated CareEvolution myFHR connecting to their EMR applications including Epic MyChart and Allscripts. In each of the demos, the demo patient gained access to their aggregated medical record including a comprehensive medication list that was augmented with OTC medications. NY Presby illustrated connection to both their own EMR plus the EMR of Cornell using myFHR.