April 2020

Male surgeon standing arms crossed in the operating room, Confident surgeon in blue scrubs poses in an operating room, the calm before the intricate dance of surgery begins.

Benefits of FHIR (Infographic)

When Prolifics engineers first learned about HL7’s FHIR standards, in response to the Healthcare industry’s challenge with interoperability, ideas began pouring into our Innovation Center. The result: our Quick FHIR solution that goes beyond API integration with your existing systems to include a layer of security and AI and machine learning technology to help you better manage and analyze your data.

This infographic provides an at-a-glance description of the benefits of FHIR to your health organization. Be sure to click to see the large version.

Who benefits from FHIR?

Developers

FHIR builds on, co-exists with and leverages HL7’s earlier product lines (HL7 v2, HL7 v3, CDA) and uses common web standards (RESTful services, XML, JSON, HTTP, and OAuth), so developers wanting to try their hand at FHIR may find themselves in familiar territory. They will also find the following appealing about FHIR:

  • Open-source and free to use
  • Comes with out-of-the-box interoperability
  • Base resources can be used as-is or adapted as needed
  • Integrates with popular web service technologies

Patients

Making health data accessible to patients lets them take more control of their own healthcare decisions. From diet and exercise to treatment and medicine, more data about health factors means smarter consumers. Patients benefit because FHIR:

  • Allows new technologies to aggregate health data
    • Example: Apple’s Health app
  • Eliminates duplicate tests and services, reducing costs
  • Prevents errors due to missing or incomplete patient data
    • According to a study conducted by Johns Hopkins, 44 percent of medical error deaths are preventable

Researchers

FHIR has the potential to make healthcare data more available for clinical research, epidemiology, outcomes research and more. Accessible EHR and patient-originated data can mean:

  • Shorter, less expensive clinical trials
  • Improved interactions with clinicians and patients
  • Improved risk assessment of new medical products

Physicians

EHR integration lets physicians find health records and the data they contain more quickly. With AI/machine learning added to the mix, the potential benefits of FHIR become even more attractive:

  • Improved diagnoses and treatment plans
  • Faster patient visits
  • Flexibility to change vendors due to increased system compatibility

Payers

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is changing the ways health insurance carriers (such as UnitedHealth Group and Blue Cross Blue Shield Association) address interoperability and patient access to data.  Under the regulations, payers can leverage FHIR standards to better coordinate care in many ways, including:

  • Easily update providers about health plan protocols
  • Freer exchange of claims data and other patient health information via apps from third-party developers
  • Automated evaluation/approval process, reducing time spent answering phone calls from practice staff about coverage

We invite you to share this with your colleagues and check out our FHIR information hub. If you want to learn more about technology solutions that help you optimize the FHIR standard and be prepared for new CMS and ONC rules for managing your data, contact us at solutions@prolifics.com.

I'm liking this section here..but it still needs a little work

Is Your Data Ready? CCPA Wants to Know

The state of California starts enforcing the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) on July 1. With enforcement comes fines of $2,500 per compliance violation, which goes up to $7,500 if the violation is considered due to negligence. Californians can also sue you if their personal information is compromised through a data breach, again if due to company negligence.

Under CCPA, Californians have the right to know what personal information of theirs is collected, used, shared or sold by you; can ask you to delete their personal information; and can opt-out of the sale of their personal information.

CCPA compliance (like GDPR compliance before it and other government data privacy laws on their way) begins with you knowing all about your customers’ personally identifiable information (PII) data. You must be able to answer questions like:

  • what data do you store?
  • where is the data?
  • who has access to the data?
  • what is the data being used for?

So, data privacy is linked to, and part of, the larger issues of data governance, data management and data security.

There are many products and solutions out there that say they can tell you all about your data. When evaluating any type of data privacy or data identification software, make sure to ask these questions:

Are you scanning all of my data?

Some products just scan file names or column headers or rely on sampling. You need a solution that will deep scan and find all the nooks and crannies where PII could be hiding – such as servers, email systems and shared drives, whether in the cloud or on-premises. Some products are only capable of looking at structured data. The problem with this is that CCPA compliance means knowing what’s in your unstructured and semi-structured data as well.

Can the solution learn as it goes?

A solution needs to go beyond the basic scan. Solutions armed with artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) see data dynamics and relationships, intentional or unintentional, that you may not even know exist. As it learns, an AI/ML solution can produce data rules, which become the basis for determining data quality.

What will the data scan deliver?

You should expect an inventory of your data assets and holdings with reports on data locations, quality, classifications and sensitivities. From these, you should be able to discuss how serious your data problems are, using the scan as the basis for your next steps. A determination of data quality upfront is an important time saver. It removes the need for lengthy discussions with your own personnel – your subject matter experts – on whether certain data values define quality. The solution should have already identified quality characteristics.

How long should a data scan take?

This pretty obvious question can have a wide range of answers, even depending on the size of the scan. Given comparable quality and size, the better solutions can take a few days to do the complete scan, compared to weeks for the others.

Will the solution continue to work for me?

Data privacy compliance is not a “one and done.” Data is constantly coming into your company. The solution should have the ability to remain in an ongoing role – a monitoring process for the inflow of PII going forward.

How can we help?

If you need someone to talk with about your CCPA preparedness, our experts are here for you. If we believe our solution will meet your needs, we can introduce our basic assessment offering – a “compliance health check.” We’ll do an inventory and assessment of the data you have in a way for you to understand your general risk and exposure.

We have the products and solutions to help your company work towards compliance with any data privacy laws. This includes Data Hawk – an accelerator and an absolute key technology for data privacy projects. Data Hawk is unique to the industry in its deep data scanning and data interrogation capabilities.

Visit our expert hub to dive into all areas of data privacy. To learn more about our CCPA compliance products and solutions, email us at solutions@prolifics.com.