Change Healthcare on Monday said it will make its application programming interfaces available for free to help health plans comply with CMS's recent interoperability and patient access final rule.

WHY IT MATTERS
The rule requires that payers enable access to patient data using open APIs by January 1, 2021. Additionally, health plans are required to address cybersecurity and consent risks – ensuring that patient data is only made available to third parties authorized by the patient.

By deploying Change Healthcare's Connected Consumer Health interoperability technology, these organizations could achieve compliance more easily and efficiently, according to the company.

The APIs address the standards-based interoperability challenges, while also offering security, identity-management and consent-management capabilities as payers to meet CMS's requirements to administer patient identity and provide data to third-party apps in accordance with HIPAA.

THE LARGER TREND
While CMS has offered some leeway in terms of enforcement timelines, health plans need to start planning now to meet their patient access requirements.

As we've reported, the rules pose some big challenges for payers, who will soon be responsible for data sharing and patient access in a way they're not typically used to. "A lot will have to go into meeting that deadline," said one expert.

ON THE RECORD
"This is a time-sensitive, complex, and potentially costly issue, with many challenges that payers are seeking to address now," said Kris Joshi, president of network solutions at Change Healthcare.

"With Connected Consumer Health, Change Healthcare is helping payers achieve CMS compliance quickly while dramatically reducing cybersecurity and consent risks, complexity, and cost," he said. The pandemic has shown us the potential of, and the need to, accelerate digital health. By leveraging industry standards-based interoperability APIs and identity-management tools, payers can immediately accelerate their digital health initiatives."

Twitter: @MikeMiliardHITN
Email the writer: mike.miliard@himssmedia.com
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