Anthem is also testing the exchange of data that shows when a hospital or doctor's office has achieved a number of quality measures. The information exchanged could give doctors vital information in an emergency. One involves sending the hospital real-time notifications when one of its patients checks into another hospital. What comes next: testing exchanges of specific kinds of health recordsĬhennuru says there are many other pieces to the interoperability puzzle, but he believes the industry is about two years away from being able to make it a reality.Īnthem is currently testing data exchanges with a hospital system partner. If a patient is admitted to and discharged from a hospital in one state, and then falls sick and is admitted to a hospital in another state, records could be quickly and easily exchanged to save doctors time diagnosing or ordering tests. The latter, called admit and discharge data, could be critical in an emergency. Using FHIR will mean that, “when exchanging data, healthcare institutions and companies won’t have to convert it to another format to be able to read or use it,” says Chennuru.įor health insurers, that data could include a member’s claims data, lab results, and even hospital admission and discharge data, among others. The standard, called FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources), is one many healthcare groups have agreed to use. So now, Anthem and industry partners are working on converting their data into a standard format everyone can use to communicate with each other. It’s another to make it exchangeable with other healthcare partners.” Next, says Chennuru, “It’s one thing to have the data. The health plan has now linked the correct records to millions of individual members. How do you make sure the right test results and treatment notes and claims are tied to the right Peter Johnson? How do you make sure the health information you're exchanging with a hospital or doctor's office includes only one Peter Johnson's records? Anthem has been working for nine years to solve that problem. Imagine there are a million patients or members in your system named Peter Johnson. “If you don't have a unique way to identify a person,” says Ashok Chennuru, Anthem’s chief data and analytics officer, “nothing else matters.” The health plan has just completed work on one of the building blocks of interoperability: being able to identify a unique patient record. Identifying the right records is keyĪnthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield (Anthem) has cleared one of the fundamental hurdles along the way. BCBS companies are working with public and private entities to get closer to this ability to share data - something called interoperability. More than one in three Americans are covered by a BCBS plan, making BCBS data a vital part of the health data landscape. But Blue Cross and Blue Shield (BCBS) companies are playing a critical role in the effort. Getting all of these systems to talk to each other is complicated. Help healthcare providers and insurers monitor quality trends.Empower patients to be better advocates for their own health. ![]() Avoid repeating tests and treatments, keeping costs down.Help doctors make better treatment decisions in the moment.Securely sharing health records across systems and providing access to patients could: Records from visits to a primary care doctor live in that physician’s online system. Test results from a visit to an ER at one hospital stay in that database. Right now, most of our health data lives in silos. One health insurer has taken major steps to make that data more accessible. ![]() When our personal health records are available to the people who care for us, care can be better and more cost-effective.
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