Developing Scalable Infrastructure for Clinical Data Interoperability and Patient Access

The CMS Interoperability and Patient Access final rule established the requirement for healthcare providers to provide direct access to patients’ electronic medical records via APIs. Many providers and health plans turned to interoperability solutions to support compliance by July 1, 2021 and prepare to exchange data in the new FHIR standard. Health Care Services Corp., (HCSC) lacked the infrastructure to manage, standardize, and convert massive amounts of legacy data streams into FHIR resources to support patient access. To ensure CMS compliance by the original deadline, HCSC designed a scalable, enterprise-level clinical data infrastructure that standardized, enriched, and converted >420 million historical data records, including CCDs HL7v2 messages, and FHIR resources, into >6 billion analytics-ready FHIR resources in <3 months. This infrastructure is the foundation of their Clinical Data Accelerator program, which is at the center of HCSC’s data-driven approach to innovation and interoperability. As a result, HCSC was awarded by ONC for being among just 5% of plans nationally to successfully meet the Patient Access rule by the original deadline. This presentation will discuss the data and technology strategy underpinning HCSC’s innovative Clinical Data Accelerator program and describe challenges and successes related to patient data sharing use cases.