The adoption of HL7 FHIR is rapidly accelerating due to recognition of its benefits in reducing clinician burden, improving the exchange of quality measure data and enabling real-time patient, provider and payer data access. FHIR also provides a path to meet the federal interoperability and patient access rules.

The goals for this event were to:

• Educate interested parties at CMS and within the health IT community about HL7 FHIR, FHIR implementation guides (IGs) developed by the Da Vinci Project and the CARIN Alliance and their real-world uses.
• Support impacted stakeholders as they comply with the CMS and ONC interoperability rules.
• Engage providers, payers, and partners to join the growing collaborative FHIR community and directly access associated free and open resources.

Interoperability and Patient Access Final Rule

In the May 2020 Interoperability and Patient Access final rule (CMS-9115-F), the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) suggested the use of certain HL7 FHIR specifications to support application programming interfaces (APIs).

The agency is showing its support of these standards by hosting this Connectathon, to ensure adequate testing which will advance the standards for the broad range of healthcare exchange scenarios. Many of these use cases are on the critical path to meeting the requirements of the May 2020 interoperability rules from both CMS and the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC).