From stage 2 to stage 3
The latest criteria for 2015 CEHRT is intended to facilitate greater interoperability between health information systems and enable health information exchanges through new certification criteria, standards and implementation specifications.
The 2015 Edition EHR definitions differ from the 2014 in the following ways
• It does not include privacy and security capabilities and certification criteria
• It only includes capabilities to record and export clinical quality measure data
• It includes smoking status, sexual orientation and gender identity as demographic criteria
• It requires an “application access” certification — API — to support electronic data exchange
API access rules for MU 2015
Following are three criteria which are pertaining to API access
• 170 315(g)(7) Application Access Patient Selection
• 170 315(g)(8) Application Access Data Category Request
• 170 315(g)(9) Application Access all data request
The first one, 170.315(g)(7) states following functional requirement of ability to receive a request with sufficient information to uniquely identify a patient and return an ID or other token that can be used by an application to subsequently execute requests for that patient’s data. The second one, 170 315(g)(8) mentions all resources that are required to be shared through this API access and search criteria, while third one 170 315(g)(9) specifies the ability to return all data in CCD template as per HL7 CDA R2 implementation.
How FHIR can help
Considering FHIR over creating an API that is completely custom for the given product has certain advantages. You are getting a standard format for API and lots of acceptance from the developer community to build value adding services and features for your EMR. Its a well defined path for you to go on more and more supporting features that FHIR will roll out. FHIR resources can be mapped and authentication policy can be adopted as per your EHR impelementation.
THOUGHTi has helped its several EHR cloud companies to support MU3 criteria through FHIR, using its skilled resources to roll out API feature within weeks time !! Please get in touch with us to discuss more.