During the Fall of 2018, Carequality announced that it would add FHIR-based exchange to its existing Query-Based Document Exchange Use Case model. This will extend Carequality’s governance Framework to enable access to and exchange of clinical data, using FHIR-based APIs. The end game is to publish the first edition of the Carequality FHIR Implementation Guide. Last month, we attained our first major milestone towards this accomplishment.
On May 14, 2019 we had our first FHIR Connectathon. Our goal for this event was to have participants interact with a directory, ideally performing the full suite of CRUD Operations (Create, Read, Update, and Delete). 100% of the Participants were able to Read the Directory, while 80% of them were also able to Publish, Update, and Delete their entries. Most of the connectathon participants are not current Carequality Framework Adopters, so we proved that we could successfully interact with many different players, including consumer applications, payers, and EMR software vendors alike.
The latest draft of the ONC TEFCA is aimed at broadening the exchange of clinical data. Not only are we positioning ourselves to serve this need, our plan is to create a FHIR ecosystem where our Implementers thrive in this environment. Our next step is to take the lessons learned from this connectathon and incorporate our experiences into our constantly maturing Draft Implementation Guide. And our next goal is to have another connectathon over the summer where clinical data is exchanged in a fully authenticated/secure test environment.
As the weather heats up, be on the lookout for another Carequality FHIR Workgroup update.