Google Cloud Launches Interoperability Readiness Program for Healthcare Stakeholders

Google Cloud has announced the launch of its Healthcare Interoperability Readiness Program, designed to help healthcare organizations understand their current interoperability maturity levels, while also navigate changes and increase their readiness for the new Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) rules.

In a blog post, two Google Cloud executives—Aashima Gupta, global director, healthcare strategy and solutions, and Amit Zavery, vice president, business application platform—wrote that its program “is built to meet customers wherever they are on their interoperability journeys, and to empower them with tailored services, technologies and strategies.” The organization is working with a variety of both consultants and ISV partners like Bain & Company, Boston Consulting Group, Deloitte, HCL Technologies, KPMG, MavenWave, Pluto7, SADA and 8K Miles to help meet customers’ needs and support the changes needed to meet the upcoming regulatory requirements, they wrote.

Released to the public on March 9, senior healthcare officials from the Trump administration dropped two significant final regulations around interoperability and patient access, one coming from ONC and the other from CMS. Broadly, the two rules clarify issues around information blocking, and promote the development of a nationally consistent patient access API (application programming interface) concept, designed to make access to their electronic health records (EHRs) available to all patients through their smartphones. The regulations apply to all hospitals, physicians, and health plans that receive any reimbursement through either the Medicare or Medicaid programs.

The Google Cloud executives stated that in speaking with their customers, the number of healthcare organizations that feel prepared to meet these new requirements is small. The reason for this, they said, is that providers and payers aren’t sure where to start. And with many critical applications running on legacy IT systems that aren’t built on modern web standards, the goal can seem daunting, they noted.

Indeed, a recent survey of providers, payers and vendors revealed a wide range of stakeholder concerns as it relates to the final rules. For instance, the survey from the eHealth Initiative (eHI) found that 72 percent, industry-wide, said they probably or definitely would want the rules to get delayed. To this end, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, federal health officials recently decided to extend the deadlines for stakeholders to comply with a variety of information blocking and other health IT-related mandates in the ONC rule, by five months in some instances, and a whole calendar year in others. CMS has also delayed the compliance deadlines for implementing the Patient Access and Provider Directory APIs until July 1, 2021.

According to Gupta and Zavery, “Just as interoperability is foundational to achieving the transformational goals in healthcare for everything from telemedicine to app-based healthcare ecosystems, application programming interfaces, or APIs, are the foundation for interoperability. APIs have been around for decades and allow data to flow across disparate systems. Whereas older APIs were designed for bespoke integration projects, modern APIs are designed to be easy for developers and have become the standard for building mobile applications.”

In addition to APIs, implementation of open data standards—such as FHIR—is another critical step toward interoperability, the Google executives wrote. They noted that have “worked closely with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and collaborated across the tech industry to support open standards to electronically exchange healthcare information and build an ecosystem that supports data privacy, security, compliance, and API management.”

Google Cloud’s Interoperability Readiness Program entails a broad set of services for interoperability, including:

• HealthAPIx Accelerator that offers a blueprint for healthcare stakeholders and app developers to build FHIR API-based digital experiences, officials contend.
• Apigee API Management that provides the underpinning and enables a security and governance layer to deliver, manage, secure and scale APIs; consume and publish FHIR-ready APIs for partners and developers; build API analytics, and accelerate rollout of digital solutions, say officials.
• Google Cloud Healthcare API that enables secure methods (including de-identification) for ingesting, transforming, harmonizing, and storing data in the latest FHIR formats.
• Interoperability toolkit that includes solution architectures, implementation guides, sandboxes and other resources to aim to help accelerate interoperability adoption and streamline compliance with standards such as FHIR R4.
  

The executives wrote in their post, “As we reflect on the lessons of COVID-19, building resilient interoperable health infrastructure will not only be a catalyst, but table stakes for delivering better care. The Healthcare Interoperability Readiness Program aims to help free up patient data and make it more accessible across the continuum of care, as well as set up organizations for long-term success with more modern, API-first architectures. We’re eager to help payers, providers, and life sciences organizations navigate these changes—and ultimately save patient lives.”