– Event part of HL7’s Da Vinci Project to standardize data-sharing capabilities among payors and providers –
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – May 29, 2019 – GuideWell Mutual Holding Corporation (GuideWell) is hosting the HL7 Da Vinci Project from May 29-31 at its corporate headquarters in Jacksonville, Fla.
The collaborative event aims to improve health care interoperability – the way health care data is shared in a universal language among stakeholders, including doctors, hospitals, emergency rooms, members and insurers – to improve health outcomes and increase the focus of value-based care for patients.
The industry continues to respond to the need for improved interoperability, with a renewed call and increased momentum since February when the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) proposed additional and clarifying rules to support seamless and secure access, exchange, and use of electronic health information. The proposed rules further set requirements for Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, Medicare Advantage plans and Qualified Health Plans in the Federally-facilitated Exchanges (as part of the Affordable Care Act) to provide enrollees with electronic access to medical claims and other health information electronically by 2020.
In 2018, more than 20 health care companies formed the Da Vinci Project, a private-sector initiative that is leveraging HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) to improve data via data-sharing test cases. HL7 is the not-for-profit global authority for health care information interoperability and standards with affiliates established in more than 30 countries. Da Vinci aims to minimize the development and deployment of one-off solutions between partners with a goal to help medical groups and health plans better deliver on clinical quality, cost and care management outcomes.
“While teams across the country have been devoted to improving health care interoperability, the HHS announcement provided the spark needed to increase the focus and engagement by all stakeholders to find a reliable solution for the industry,” said Tamara StClaire, senior vice president and chief strategy and innovation officer for GuideWell. “Rarely does a collaboration opportunity like this come along, where individual company objectives take a back seat for the betterment of the industry. We at GuideWell are honored to play a role in the process.”
At the three-day GuideWell event, participants from across the industry will test draft HL7 FHIR standard implementation guides and supporting artifacts as the group works to define a common set of health care data standards that can be implemented on a national basis. Some of the workflows to be tested at this Connectathon include:
- Clinical Data Exchange (CDex) and Health Record Exchange (HRex) – This allows providers and insurers to more effectively manage a patient’s care by tracking health care services planned or received to improve outcomes and reduce administrative burden.
- Prior Authorization Support (PAS) – This effort enables a provider, at point of service, to request authorization (including all necessary clinical information to support the request) and receive immediate results.
- Clinical Reasoning Track (DEQM) – Payers and providers need universal tools to share the data required to complete medication reconciliation for transitions of care, care management plans, and medication changes.
More than 100 participants from public and Da Vinci member organizations; leading industry insurers, providers, EMR (electronic medical records) and IT (information technology) vendors will participate in the GuideWell Connectathon, including many of the Da Vinci members. Florida Blue is hosting several leading Florida providers, national health care plans, including other Blue plans. The event includes HIT integration technology companies and several of the learning electronic health records (EHR) companies, which will have teams actively working with payers and providers to test these emerging standards based application programming interfaced (APIs).
“The Da Vinci community has been hard at work for the past 18 months identifying business driven requirements necessary to build the draft standards, bringing the industry’s best and brightest to drive and develop the guides, test scripts and reference code,” said Jocelyn Keegan, Da Vinci Program Manager. “Through GuideWell’s generosity, we are able to provide modern space to work, access to experts and a hands-on environment for this growing community to test. A smaller group of Da Vinci members will spend the end of the week brainstorming, defining and setting the business requirements for our next round of work.”
About the Da Vinci Project
Interoperability challenges have limited many stakeholders in the healthcare community from achieving better care at lower cost. The dual challenges of data standardization and easy information access are compromising the ability of both payers and providers to create efficient care delivery solutions and effective care management models. The goal of the Da Vinci project is to help payers and providers to positively impact clinical, quality, cost and care management outcomes. To learn more please visit http://www.hl7.org/about/davinci/index.cfm, or to review project artifacts https://confluence.hl7.org/display/DVP/Da+Vinci.