The CARIN Blue Button^® data model and draft implementation guide

July 30, 2019 – Washington, D.C.

Last year, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services launched Blue Button® 2.0 which allows 44 million Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries digital access to their historical claims information through an application of their choice. This functionality has empowered millions of Medicare beneficiaries to more easily access their health information and provides them an opportunity to work with their physician to make better care decisions for themselves and their family.

After many months of work, today the private sector released the CARIN Blue Button® data model and draft implementation guide as part of the White House Blue Button® Developers Conference. The CARIN Blue Button® draft implementation guide includes more than 240 claim data elements that have been agreed on by multiple regional and national health plans. These data elements are included in what we are calling the common payer consumer data set or CPCDS. We have taken these data elements and mapped them to HL7® FHIR® resources to better assist health plans implement the CMS Interoperability and Patient Access proposed rule.

We are also pleased to announce today the following organizations will participate in real-world testing of the CARIN Blue Button® HL7® FHIR® API data model and draft implementation guide in 2019 so we can work to move the API into production in 2020.

Sheryl Turney, Anthem, Inc.
Ricky Bloomfield, MD, Apple
Kristen Valdes, b.well
Jim Adamson, BlueCross BlueShield of Arkansas
Kari Hedges, BlueCross BlueShield Association
Somesh Nigam, BlueCross BlueShield of Louisiana
Dr. Patrick Conway and Robert Emerson, BlueCross BlueShield of North Carolina
Nick Coussoule and Heather Kennedy, BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee
Jennifer DeAngelis and Karen Xie, Blue Shield of California
Laurent Rotival, Cambia Health Solutions / Regence BlueCross BlueShield
Amit Shah, Florida Blue
Aashima Gupta, Joe Corkery and Ilia Tulchinsky, Google
Heather Cox, Humana
Claudia Williams and David Kates, Manifest MedEx
Dr. Josh Mandel, Microsoft
Dr. Greg Robinson, Marshfield Clinic Health System-Security Health Plan
Upen Patel, Prominence Health Plan
Scott Haas, UPMC Health Plan
Jessie Tenenbaum and Corey Mercy, State of North Carolina
Cathie Ott, State of Washington

We appreciate each of these organizations and their commitment to advancing real-world testing of the CARIN Blue Button® draft implementation guide later this year. We also appreciate the leadership of the Office of American Innovation, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT to advance nationwide health care interoperability.

But we are not done! Our next steps to advance the CARIN Blue Button® draft implementation guide is to work with standards development organizations, health plans, state Medicaid agencies, and third-party applications to continue to refine the data mapping, define the specific value sets, and develop a reference implementation to enable real-world testing later this year. We look forward to testing this implementation guide with plans and third-party applications at the upcoming HL7® FHIR® Connectathon 22 that will be held September 14-15, 2019 at the Atlanta Marriott Marquis in Atlanta, Georgia.

Please join us in helping us finish the job! For more information on how you can get involved, please contact us via our website https://www.carinalliance.com/our-membership/request-to-join-carin/.

Blue Button®, the slogan, ‘Download My Data,’ the Blue Button® Logo, and the Blue Button® combined logo are registered service marks owned by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Participation by the CARIN Alliance or any of the entities named above does not imply endorsement by HHS or the U.S. government.

HL7® and FHIR® are registered trademarks owned by Health Level Seven International, Inc.