This week, the Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy/Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (formerly known as ONC), published its 2024 Draft Federal FHIR Action Plan. ASTP is billing the new document as a "curated catalog" compiling all the different ways various federal departments are using HL7's interoperability standard and its associated implementation specs.

"Federal agencies are adopting and using FHIR to meet a range of agency needs, including facilitating care coordination and expanding individuals' access to their health information," wrote Associate Deputy Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy Avinash Shanbhag and Senior Innovation Analyst Adam Wong in a Sept. 23 blog post.

"The draft action plan serves as a single resource for federal agencies and anyone else in the health IT community looking for the FHIR-based capabilities being used today by the federal government."

The aim, they said, is to help build out an innovation ecosystem that can help foster more consistent agency use of the FHIR standard, with the hope that its coordinated deployment will help further dismantle data silos "separating patients, providers, payers, public health and research."

Other priorities include more effective use of real-world evidence for regulatory approvals, research, pandemic response and social service integration.

Specifically, FHIR Action Plan focuses on six components: Core, Network, Payment and Health Quality, Care Delivery and Engagement, Public Health and Emergency Response, and Research:

• Core FHIR specifications and components are the most foundational and have the broadest applicability across healthcare services. They are used for fundamental operations and serve as reusable building blocks to support many use cases.

• Network specifications apply to FHIR capabilities for accessing and exchanging data between health information networks for securely sharing data on a nationwide scale.

• Payment and health quality components have been developed to reduce reporting burden for clinicians and caregivers.

• Care delivery and engagement specs based on FHIR seek to ease patients’ access to their health data and to the healthcare system. They also seek to reduce provider burden and assist providers in areas such as decision support.

• Public health and emergency response FHIR specs aim to modernize public health data and infrastructure.

• Research components are intended to drive toward a fully digital health system that uses FHIR for research activities.

"For each area, we list the most mature and broadly applicable FHIR-based implementation specifications including common informative characteristics," said Shanbhag and Wong. "We believe that these characteristics will help provide agencies with more context regarding the relative maturity and adoptability of the implementation specifications.

"The draft action plan also identifies early-stage FHIR capabilities that are not yet fully mature, and where federal engagement is either underway or being actively considered," they added. "This will help us track progress over time, as new implementation specifications get developed to meet the identified needs of agencies."

The draft action plan is designed to offer clarity, consistency and predictability for the public regarding the standards and implementation specifications that are being considered by federal agencies, according to ASTP, which encourages people who administer government programs with clinical health IT interoperability components to look first to the draft action plan to more fully inform their goals.

Comments received before midnight ET on Monday, November 25, will be considered for the final version of the action plan. After that, comments will be accepted year-round, the agency says, with changes made periodically based on stakeholder feedback and other changes to the health IT standards environment.

Mike Miliard is executive editor of Healthcare IT News
Email the writer: mike.miliard@himssmedia.com
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS publication.