Verma announces new 'bulk' ACO data project
CMS Administrator Seema Verma said accountable care organizations should be able to easily retrieve Medicare Part A, Part B, and Part D claims data for their beneficiaries.
So CMS is launching a project using the FHIR Bulk Spec to share Medicare claims data with ACOs, she told the Healthcare Information and Management Sytems Society's (HIMSS) annual conference and exhibition on Tuesday.
"For those of you non-techies, this means we are sharing claims data for ACO participants in a bulk format and I am pretty sure we are one of the first to use this," Verma said.
She was addressing the crowd on widespread problems of interoperability caused by siloed data that is driving up prices and hurting medical care. She also touched on proposed rules released earlier this week to end information blocking.
The goal is to put the entire HIPAA designated record set available electronically to patients, she said.
"By identifying the FHIR standard to implement our policies, we are promoting scalable data sharing, not just an individual patient record from hospital to hospital but a model that supports the flow of information across the entire healthcare system," Verma told the crowd full of health IT vendors, health system executives and payers. "We encourage industry to align in this direction because it is coming. Locking information into proprietary data models will soon be a thing of the past."