While progress is being made to advance the Cures Act, it is essential to ensure pharmacy interoperability given pharmacy’s critical role in health care.
As interoperability provisions from the 21st Century Cures Act (Cures Act) enter their enforcement phase, pharmacy leaders within the Pharmacy HIT Collaborative (PHIT), the US Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), and pharmacy system vendors, met recently to discuss the state of pharmacy interoperability. The group detailed various challenges and needs associated with pharmacy interoperability, information sharing, and connectivity.
The goal was to identify action items and next steps, particularly for integrating and using the data that are embedded in the Pharmacists eCare Plan(PeCP) with providers’ electronic health records (EHRs) systems and data exchange mechanisms used by health care payers. ONC is tasked with implementing the Cures Act Final Rule.
The challenges identified at these recent meetings included the inability and resistance of receiving partners (payers or providers) to incorporate native Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource (FHIR) content within their systems; terminology/value set misalignment among the various standardized codes used; limitations with the United States Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI) medication data class; and the lack of prioritization of EHR integration requests. The need to exchange electronic information in an interoperable way is a priority for health care providers, such as pharmacists.
While progress is being made to advance the Cures Act, it is essential to ensure pharmacy interoperability given pharmacy’s critical role in health care. As such, the PeCP is a key priority in efforts to improve connectivity and information sharing between pharmacists and other health care providers.
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