Change Healthcare to provide healthcare data interoperability

Change Healthcare announced free clinical data interoperability services for the healthcare industry. The foundational infrastructure services, namely record locator service, identity management and document retrieval solution with protection of patient privacy, support a comprehensive range of use cases. By providing these services, Change Healthcare is paving the way for health IT interoperability that removes cost barriers, meets federally mandated requirements and enables the potential for innovative offerings to better address value-based payment and consumer needs.

The interoperability services will run on the secure,scalable and agile Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud, providing Change Healthcarewith the ability to support better health outcomes, and transparency forpatients and clinicians at scale across the United States.

Fundamentally patient-focused, the initiative is designed toenhance patients’ access to their medical records and support clinicaldecisions that influence medical outcomes. By eliminating cost-prohibitivebarriers that have hampered open interoperability, it will help acceleratehealthcare data interoperability and reduce providers’ burden by reducing timeand effort needed to track down patients’ medical records from various silosacross health care delivery systems.

“With consumers carrying an increasing share of thehealthcare cost burden, the focus of interoperability services must be onempowering providers and patients with timely access to their data, so they canmake better decisions,” said Kris Joshi, PhD, executive vice president andpresident, Network Solutions, at Change Healthcare. “With billions of dollarsinvested in electronic medical record systems, we are working with companiesthroughout the industry to make data available and useful to patients andproviders wherever it is needed. Our goal is to eliminate cost as a barrier tonational interoperability.”

In recent years, market trends like value-based paymentprograms and increasing consumerism have driven the need for prompt andcomplete access to clinical information. Given these trends and the expected21st Century Cures Act regulations, along with the Trusted Exchange Frameworkand Common Agreement (TEFCA), the industry’s needs are rapidly evolving, presentingan opportunity to achieve nationwide interoperability.

“AWS provides services to support those who want toimplement ubiquitous healthcare interoperability,” said Shez Partovi, M.D.,director of worldwide healthcare and life sciences, business and marketdevelopment at Amazon Web Services. “AWS provides a secure, agile and scalableinfrastructure, with access to over 100 HIPAA-eligible services, enablingChange Healthcare to support the delivery of critical and accurate medicalinformation from a variety of sources across the healthcare industry. We’reexcited to support enhanced care quality and a better provider and patientexperience, all while driving down the cost of care.”

From its interconnected and neutral position at the centerof healthcare, Change Healthcare is uniquely qualified to support thistransition to universal health data interoperability. In collaboration withAWS, Change Healthcare is able to provide a scalable, secure, andhighly-available cloud service. The interoperability services allow forprotection of patient privacy, enforcing consent by leveraging open standardslike FHIR, HL7 and open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to integratewith all electronic medical record systems.