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Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft pledge commitment to interoperability

Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft were some of the organisations in Washington D.C. on Tuesday to announce plans to provide consumers with easier access to their medical information.

The providers pledged their commitment to interoperability and the joint venture has led to the development of new specifications.

The CARIN Blue Button® data model and draft implementation guide as part of the White House Blue Button® Developers Conference was launched.

The draft implementation guide includes more than 240 claim data elements that have been agreed on by multiple regional and national health plans. These data elements have been mapped to HL7® FHIR® resources to better assist health plans implement the CMS Interoperability and Patient Access proposed rule.

The following organisations agreed to participate in testing of the CARIN Blue Button® HL7® FHIR® API data model and draft implementation guide in 2019 to then move to the API production in 2020.

  • Sheryl Turney, Anthem, Inc.
  • Ricky Bloomfield, MD, Apple
  • Kristen Valdes, b.well
  • Jim Adamson, BlueCross BlueShield of Arkansas
  • Kari Hedges, BlueCross BlueShield Association
  • Somesh Nigam, BlueCross BlueShield of Louisiana
  • Dr. Patrick Conway and Robert Emerson, BlueCross BlueShield of North Carolina
  • Nick Coussoule and Heather Kennedy, BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee
  • Jennifer DeAngelis and Karen Xie, Blue Shield of California
  • Laurent Rotival, Cambia Health Solutions / Regence BlueCross BlueShield
  • Amit Shah, Florida Blue
  • Aashima Gupta, Joe Corkery and Ilia Tulchinsky, Google
  • Heather Cox, Humana
  • Claudia Williams and David Kates, Manifest MedEx
  • Dr. Josh Mandel, Microsoft
  • Dr. Greg Robinson, Marshfield Clinic Health System-Security Health Plan
  • Upen Patel, Prominence Health Plan
  • Scott Haas, UPMC Health Plan
  • Jessie Tenenbaum and Corey Mercy, State of North Carolina
  • Cathie Ott, State of Washington

The news was well received on social media:

Dr. Taha A. Kass-Hout, MD, MS, Director of Healthcare and Chief Medical Officer, AWS Public Sector said “As patients navigate the healthcare system, their records should be easily transferrable between all organisations to ensure continuity of care. In collaboration with customers and partners such as Change Healthcare, Cloudticity, Cerner, and Black Pear Software, AWS enables the interoperability of healthcare data by offering secure, scalable solutions to support a patient-centric approach. We see open standards interoperability tools, like FHIR, as building blocks that can improve the 21st century patient experience. We hope to see FHIR spark innovation in the healthcare space to reduce costs, increase access, and improve health outcomes.”

“At Google Cloud, we remain committed to enabling interoperability of healthcare data,” said Aashima Gupta, Director of Healthcare, Google Cloud. “We are very proud to join stakeholders in the technology community to help create solutions for the adoption of open standards and technologies for healthcare data interoperability. Cloud led transformation provides a holistic strategy to enable interoperability at scale and help break down healthcare data silos to deliver better patient outcomes at lower costs across the entire health ecosystem.”

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