InterSystems this week announced that it would join the Vulcan FHIR Accelerator Program, which was recently convened by Health Level Seven International to enable greater interoperability for clinical researchers.

WHY IT MATTERS
The company joins government and regulatory agencies, standards-development groups, academic institutions, life sciences and tech vendors and others. The goal of the initiative is to broaden the reach of HL7's FHIR interoperability spec to include clinical research.

With its membership in the new multi-stakeholder project, InterSystems aims to accelerate advancement toward a "learning health system," by enabling easier exchange of research data with clinical-care data, improving translational research for better patient outcomes.

The Vulcan FHIR Accelerator Program was launched in August 2020 to help mitigate delays for researchers in securely and efficiently acquiring electronic health record data.

By leveraging FHIR to streamline sharing and access of clinical data, the aim is to boost efficiency and enable more and faster therapeutic discoveries.

For its part, InterSystems will bring a deep data-sharing experience to the Vulcan program, "powering the exchange and representation of a unified healthcare record among payers, patients, academic medical centers and other healthcare organizations to build tools for transitioning real-world data from EHRs to clinical researchers working on the latest medical treatments," according to the company.

InterSystems will help with fine-tune data exchange from the point of collection to the clinical research setting, it said.

THE LARGER TREND
Cambridge, Massachusetts-based InterSystems has long been a vocal proponent of FHIR-based information exchange.

In 2018, InterSystems became part of HL7's Da Vinci Project – a similar initiative to the Vulcan accelerator, but one designed to use FHIR to enable closer payer-provider data sharing for value-based reimbursement models.

This past November, the company updated its HealthShare platform with expanded FHIR capabilities to enable broader access to provider, payer and pharmacy benefits data. Other efforts include the launch three years ago of InterSystems' FHIR interoperability sandbox.

ON THE RECORD
"Clean, aggregated, and normalized data is essential in clinical care, and the backbone of efficient medical research," said Don Woodlock, vice president of Healthcare Solutions at InterSystems, in a statement this week about the company's Vulcan membership.

"Driven by data and committed to expanding interoperability to improve patient outcomes, we are proud to join the Vulcan FHIR Accelerator Program and work hand-in-hand with other prominent stakeholders to provide data from the EHR appropriately to clinical researchers who can leverage this 'unified research record' to discover breakthrough treatments in healthcare," he said.

"As a trusted partner for some of the world's largest healthcare organizations, InterSystems brings a deep expertise and understanding of the value of interoperability," added HL7 International CEO Dr. Charles Jaffe. "We look forward to leveraging their experience to help clinical researchers more effectively acquire and exchange critical healthcare data." 

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