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 theprivate sector released the CARIN Blue Button® data modeland draft implementation guide as part of the White House Blue Button® DevelopersConference. The CARIN Blue Button® draft implementation guide includes morethan 240 claim data elements that have been agreed on by multiple regional andnational health plans. These data elements are included in what we are callingthe common payer consumer data set or CPCDS. We have taken these data elementsand mapped them to HL7® FHIR® resources to better assist health plans implementthe CMS Interoperability and Patient Access proposed rule.
We are also pleased to announce today the following organizationswill participate in real-world testing of the CARIN Blue Button® HL7® FHIR® APIdata model and draft implementation guide in 2019 so we can work to move theAPI 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 toadvancing real-world testing of the CARIN Blue Button® draft implementationguide later this year. We also appreciate the leadership of the Office ofAmerican Innovation, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and theOffice of the National Coordinator for Health IT to advance nationwide healthcare interoperability.
But we are not done! Our next steps to advance the CARIN BlueButton® draft implementation guide is to work with standards developmentorganizations, health plans, state Medicaid agencies, and third-partyapplications to continue to refine the data mapping, define the specific valuesets, and develop a reference implementation to enable real-world testing laterthis year. We look forward to testing this implementation guide with plans andthird-party applications at the upcoming HL7® FHIR® Connectathon 22 that will beheld September 14-15, 2019 at the Atlanta Marriott Marquis in Atlanta, Georgia.
Please join us in helping us finish the job! For more informationon 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, ‘DownloadMy Data,’ the BlueButton® Logo, and the BlueButton® combined logo are registered service marks owned bythe U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Participation by the CARINAlliance or any of the entities named above does not imply endorsement by HHSor the U.S. government.
HL7® and FHIR® areregistered trademarks owned by Health Level Seven International, Inc.