Electronic Health Reporter

Health Level Seven International (HL7), the global authority for interoperability in healthcare information technology with members in 55 countries, today announced that Accenture and Surescripts have joined the Argonaut Project.

The Argonaut Project was launched in December 2014 to address the recommendations of the JASON Task Force, a joint task force of the HIT Standards and Policy Committees. The goal of the project is to accelerate the development and adoption of HL7’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (HL7 FHIR). HL7’s FHIR is a next generation standards framework that leverages the latest web standards and applies a tight focus on implementation. It is a RESTful API, which is an approach based on modern internet conventions and widely used in other industries. HL7 FHIR offers enormous flexibility; for patients and providers, its versatility can be applied to mobile devices, web-based applications, cloud communications, and EHR data-sharing using modular components.

The Argonaut Project is funding current FHIR development efforts to provide practical and focused FHIR profiles and implementation guides to the healthcare IT industry. Micky Tripathi, chief executive officer and president of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative and Argonaut project manager, noted that the industry is looking to HL7 FHIR to advance interoperability in healthcare. He stated, “We are delighted that the Argonaut Project has garnered so much industry interest in accelerating the development of HL7 FHR and OAuth security. The addition of Accenture and Surescripts broadens the collaborative efforts of the Argonaut Project members to help bring a mature and quality standard to healthcare IT.” He added that, “The more testing we conduct and implementation experiences we collect, the faster we will see RESTful API-based transactions become a day-to-day reality in health information exchange.”

Accenture and Surescripts will join HL7 and the following founding members of the Argonaut Project:

• athenahealth
• Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
• Cerner
• Epic
• Intermountain Healthcare
• Mayo Clinic
• MEDITECH
• McKesson
• Partners HealthCare System
• SMART at the Boston Children’s Hospital Informatics Program
• The Advisory Board Company

“Accenture is one of the largest EHR integrators in the world, connecting people, health systems, processes and analytics solutions across the continuum of care to reduce the complexity of healthcare delivery,” said Mary Edwards, who leads Accenture’s civilian health practice. “We are proud to bring our strong interest and commitment to help achieve superior levels of interoperability for clinicians and our nation’s families and to help support the success of the Argonaut Project.”

“As a nation, we’ve made significant investments to ensure that providers have access to electronic health records to support the delivery of care,” said Tom Skelton, CEO of Surescripts.  “In order to realize a meaningful return on those investments, we must find ways to ensure the rapid, trusted, and efficient movement of health data across a fragmented healthcare system.  Our support of FHIR as an industry standard can help simplify and accelerate this process, so we can realize the full potential of interoperability across healthcare.”

For more information on HL7’s FHIR, please visit: www.HL7.org/FHIR.

About Health Level Seven International (HL7)

Founded in 1987, Health Level Seven International is the global authority for healthcare information interoperability and standards with affiliates established in more than 30 countries. HL7 is a non-profit, ANSI accredited organization that empowers global health data interoperability by developing standards and enabling their adoption and implementation. HL7’s more than 2,000 members represent approximately 500 corporate members, which include more than 90 percent of the information systems vendors serving healthcare. HL7 collaborates with other standards developers and provider, payer, philanthropic and government agencies at the highest levels to ensure the development of comprehensive and reliable standards and successful interoperability efforts.