ORLANDO — Change Healthcare on Monday here at HIMSS19 announced what it described as "free clinical data interoperability services" on Amazon Web Services for document retrieval, identity management and record locator.

THE BIGGER TREND

Interoperability is a perennial HIMSS Global Conference theme and one of the hardest problems that hospitals, health systems, payers, technology vendors and the federal government grapple with on an ongoing basis.

And it's getting more attention than ever. In August of 2018 tech big guns Amazon, IBM, Google, Microsoft, Oracle and Salesforce at a White House Blue Button 2.0 hackathon signed a pledge to eradicate interoperability barriers – and though it was short on specifics, most of these companies have come together in the past to tackle information sharing.

Also, three key interoperability moves have happened since:

• Health Level 7 International finalized FHIR 4, the first version of the standard to be normative as in compatible with future versions
• HL7 foretold FHIR 5, of which FHIR Product Director Grahame Grieve said builds on FHIR 4 with, among other advancements, brings improved support for apps that use more than one version of FHIR, multi-language support, federated servers and "new facilities for migrating data to and from v2 messages and CDA documents."
• Carequality and the CommonWell Health Alliance rolled out bi-directional health information exchange. Ahead of that, Micky Tripathi, who is on the board of both organizations, said it was a signature moment for interoperability, though by no means the end goal.

ON THE RECORD

This new initiative is "designed to enhance patients' access to their medical records and support clinical decisions that influence medical outcomes," Change Healthcare said in a statement. "The interoperability services allow foriInterfaces to integrate with EHRs.”

AWS Director of Worldwide Healthcare and Life Sciences Shez Partovit added: "AWS provides access to over 95 HIPAA-eligible features and services, enabling Change Healthcare to support the delivery of medical information from a variety of sources across the healthcare industry."

Twitter: @SullyHIT
Email the writer: tom.sullivan@himssmedia.com