Interoperability in Value-Based Care: Leveraging FHIR-compatible Data for Seamless Care Coordination and Improved Population Health

New FHIR^® data interoperability application helps payers quickly transform and manage critical data for organization-wide sharing, visibility, and care team us

Data interoperability is a hot agenda item for many healthcare organizations.

1. Stakeholders across the board – providers, payers, patients, and regulatory bodies – are recognizing the need for a frictionless data ecosystem that allows quick, accurate exchange of patient information at the point of care. Improving care coordination and outcomes and reducing overutilization depends on it.

2. Data silos are becoming even more problematic. Currently, critical patient data is often stored in multiple systems and formats, each with its own data requirements, leading to the bottlenecks and information silos that sabotage care coordination and timely treatment. FHIR® provides a common framework that allows for data exchange between different healthcare organizations, EHRs, medical devices, and other data sources.

Many healthcare organizations are also specifically needing to be compatible with the HL7^® FHIR^® standard thanks to new regulations.

But when it comes down to it, data in FHIR^®  formats is easier to leverage and access. More importantly, FHIR® data better enables seamless communication between payers, providers, and care specialists.

Unlocking Population Health with Data Interoperability

The FHIR^® standard offers a faster, simpler, more lightweight protocol for exchanging and accessing healthcare data than previous standards have. It offers standardization so that data is available in a usable format, helping to drive collaboration and optimizing clinical decisions for improved member outcomes and reduced costs.

Adopting FHIR® offers these advantages to healthcare organizations:

1. Better, more reliable access and sharing of medical/clinical data for healthcare payers, providers, and patients.
2. Easier to share and leverage the right data sets across devices and applications, with easy, secure access to medical data, and multi-person access to EMRs.
3. Enables better data management in mobile environments, with easy set-up and access on smartphones and tablets. FHIR^® data can easily be set up and accessed by mobile phones and tablets, which is key for payers and providers leveraging mobile healthcare technologies, telehealth, and for in-the-field care management for populations with LTSS and home health needs.
4. Supports a patient-centric approach to coordinated care, which leads to improvements in care collaboration and coordination. (Critical things for ACOs and MCOs!)
5. Enables seamless communication between payers, providers, and care specialists.
6. Multiple cost-savings opportunities: it’s more adaptive and less complex than other healthcare data standards, so it reduces the burden on IT and engineering teams; and with improved access and data viewing, providers and care teams can make faster, more effective decisions and gain time back to focus on building trust and engagement. FHIR® data also makes it easier to update resources because it supports RESTful Architecture.
7. Improvements in population health driven by data and insights. Compared to other complex standards, FHIR® is adaptive and easy to use. Health data can be transmitted easily with FHIR®, and the results and insights can also be analyzed more effectively.

Learn more about why FHIR^® matters in today’s modern healthcare exchange below.

However, even as healthcare organizations are working to improve data interoperability and management, challenges to adopting FHIR® abound. Read on to understand why it’s critical for payers to mitigate these challenges, and how to avoid the pitfalls that come with many of the FHIR® interoperability solutions available today.

Barriers to Implementing FHIR^® for Data Management

Bringing current datasets into compliance with FHIR^® standards can be a complex, time-consuming effort for IT and engineering departments. Often, healthcare organizations use systems built on a different schema than FHIR^®, presenting the challenge of having existing datasets that don’t conform easily to the standard.

A healthcare organization may have an interoperability engine and a FHIR^® server, both top-quality and well-functioning. However, until the server has data in it, it’s basically unusable. The biggest barriers typically relate to the work involved with getting the FHIR^® server to be able to ingest and then populate data, and using multiple systems.

Data interoperability solutions are out there – but they tend to be resource-intensive, costly, and complicated to use, presenting their own set of issues:

• They don’t always address all aspects of FHIR^® data needs: data transformation, interoperability, storage, and management. That means investing in multiple tools and applications – and driving up cost and complexity.
• Implementations are often long, expensive, and resource-intensive for IT departments, negating ROI.
• Lack of scalability in a FHIR^® solution can spell headaches down the road during updates and expansions.

HELIOShub Helps Payers Achieve Data Interoperability Benefits Faster

Achieving FHIR^® compatibility and getting to the benefits faster depends on selecting a solution that can streamline the process of bringing non-FHIR^® conformant data into compliance with FHIR^® standards. Thankfully, VirtualHealth’s revolutionary application solves this.

HELIOShub is a no-code data interoperability and FHIR® Integration Platform as a Service that works with new and existing data architectures.

Designed specifically for the payer ecosystem, it enables FHIR® transformation and interoperability more quickly, with fewer IT resources and no specialization. Payers can convert all inbound data to FHIR®-compatible formats without coding

HELIOShub‘s no-code tooling and API library reduces reliance on costly professional services and put the power of data in payers’ hands, providing lifetime value without the usual evolutionary costs. HELIOShub can reduce integration timelines for FHIR^® data by 65% or more, and it can compress delivery times for complex bi-directional flows by 80%. 

HELIOShub makes it possible to overcome common data interoperability and FHIR® adoption challenges with speed and flexibility.

1. Adopt FHIR^® as part of an existing data architecture painlessly, with configurable data transformations, flexible data transfer methods, and robust APIs, all built on FHIR®
2. Allow your entire organization to access FHIR^®  data from one place
3. Build a front-end application that requires a fully functional back-end FHIR® clinical data repository (CDR), and get interfaces out of a CDR
4. Offers a simple user experience for quick data integration delivery and management and no need for advanced certification or IT specialization
5. Meet increasing downstream systems requests for FHIR^®
6. Exchange newly-converted FHIR^® -compatible data with other enterprise platforms for organizational-wide usage
7. Faster access to interoperable FHIR^® -compatible data to expedite quality, accurate care
8. Rapid FHIR® compatibility with a no-code ETL tooling for importing file-based and non-FHIR^® API transactions
9. HELIOShub simplifies data normalization between insurers, providers, and third-party applications, providing greater flexibility with data, cost savings, and higher lifetime value.