Carequality Seeks Industry Partners to Build FHIR Governance Structure

Carequality currently supports the exchange of 14 million documents each month, serving 600,000 care providers, 35,000 clinics, and 1,250 hospitals. Formed as part of the Sequoia Project, Carequality was recently restructured as an independent organization, working in close collaboration with the Sequoia Project, according to its website.

It is still tasked with developing international standards for the transfer and exchange of health information—both clinical and administrative data. It is part of this work in which it is seeking input from the healthcare community as it adds support for FHIR-based exchange. “Member and non-member stakeholders from across the healthcare continuum are encouraged to participate in the new FHIR Implementation Guide Technical and/or Policy workgroups,” the organization said in a press release. “The former will concentrate more on specifications and security, while the latter will focus on the “’rules of the road.’”

Dave Cassel, executive director at Carequality, told Health Data Management that FHIR is a standard that can be used by health information technology systems for exchanging data in a way that enables programmers to create new interfaces to support new use cases for providers, such as development of a new app to make it easier for clinicians to access a medication list, the publication reported.

“FHIR gives the standard on how the app would get the specific medication,” Cassel told Health Data Management. “The standard communicates to outside systems to tell you how to request the medication list.”

The workgroups will not duplicate the work that is underway on multiple fronts; including defining FHIR resource specs and associated use case workflows. Instead, the workgroups will focus on the operational and policy elements needed to support the use of these resources across an organized ecosystem, according to the Carequality press release.

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[author] [author_image timthumb='on']/Portals/0/uploads/content_hub/Mary-Butler-Portrait.jpg[/author_image] [author_info]Mary Butler is the associate editor at Journal of AHIMA.[/author_info] [/author]