SOLUTION PROVIDER Q&A FHIR is the Way Forward


Tell us a little bit about some of the capabilities of FHIR that our


audience should know about. FHIR is effectively replacing a standard called HL7. HL7 was needed because, in the hospital setting, you have so many different systems across sup- ply chain, billing, labs, and more, and they needed to talk the same language. Otherwise, that system wouldn’t be able to scale. But the challenge with HL7 is that it doesn’t adhere to new best prac- tices around having HTTP access and RESTful access that supports caching, as well as other capabilities that make it easier to interact with this data. FHIR essentially made it easier to cre- ate certain resources and define what those resources and data are. For exam- ple, a patient record has a specific set of attributes, and once you follow the FHIR standard, you know that if you’re going to talk about a patient, you’re going to have to provide this data when you’re sharing it with a vendor. The beauty of this standard is that it allows everyone to speak the same language.


What is your interpretation of how the 21st Century Cures Act will interact with the development of new API’s


and the sharing of data? To understand the reasoning behind this law, we should first think about the problems that we currently face from a health technology perspective. If we want to drive innovation for patients, we must make patient data easy to access and easy to move around. That data should be accessible not just within an organization, but across organiza- tions so that you create an ecosystem of innovation on top of that data, where new startups and companies can think of ways to use that data for the benefit of patients. But there was never an incentive pre- viously for various different institutions


to do that. As a result, the data was siloed, which meant that you couldn’t access it, and you couldn’t build on top of it. The Cures Act mandated that insti-


tutions give patients access to their own data. Now, I have control over my data; I can pull it and share it with anyone I want. As a result, we’ll start seeing an ecosystem of solutions that can offer services to the patient, ask for data, and give patients back something meaningful in exchange. This can only increase innovation and help us tackle some of the challenges we see in health- care overall.


What kinds of advances will separate the more innovative health plans from


the less innovative ones? The health plans that are going to be at the cutting edge are the ones investing in building an API infrastructure inter- nally to make it easier to access member data. They can achieve this by looking to FHIR as a standard, so it’s easier to build tools and services on top of that infrastructure. At Wellframe, when we partner with a health plan, we typically need to inte- grate our system with theirs as well as with other vendors. When health plans have already invested in interoperabil- ity, the integrations are much easier, and you can enable more for the member. For plans still using custom APIs,


it’s hard to exchange and extract that data. It’s very challenging to achieve a more innovative, consumer-focused experience as a result. As a consumer, you can see when there are silos in your data—when you feel that you have to talk to six or seven departments to get an answer, or when the web interface looks very disjointed, compared to working with an organization that has a strong, cohesive experience. Even when consumers use multiple vendors or tools offered by that plan,


Mohammad Jouni MS Chief Technology Officer Wellframe


the most innovative health plans offer a connected flow of information and data as well as a seamless experience.


What’s your advice to those who are on this path


toward interoperability? Try to be an agent of acceleration of this change as much as possible at the micro and macro scale. Whether you’re the leader in an organization or a developer, learn about the standards, figure out how they fit, and lean into them. The more we all embrace these new stan- dards, the faster innovation happens, and the more we all benefit—as people trying to improve the healthcare system and as healthcare consumers ourselves.


Sponsored Content


www.wellframe.com


NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2021 | hcinnovationgroup.com 15


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32