1upHealth Announces Free Baseline Testing for Health Plans to Determine if Their Patient Access Fhir® API Is Successfully Connecting as Required by CMS

• Service Is Part of 1uphealth’s “Ask the Fhir Experts” Initiative to Expedite Healthcare’s Transformation to the Fhir Standard

1upHealth, a trusted FHIR platform for health data interoperability, announced that it is offering health plans free baseline testing to determine if their Patient Access application programming interface (API) is connecting to third-party developers as required by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Rule.

In order to speed up the progress towards greater health data interoperability, the federal government enacted regulations to push the industry to adopt APIs based on the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) protocol, a modern data standard that gives internet-like ease and functionality to healthcare data.

Recommended AI News: Shutterstock Announces Integration With OpenText, A Worldwide Leader In Digital Asset Management

“Every one of 1upHealth’s customers went live with the required APIs by July 1. Unfortunately, many health plans are still struggling with the implementation of FHIR APIs since this is all new to them,” said Ricky Sahu, CEO and Founder of 1upHealth. “In addition, CMS requires ongoing testing and monitoring. As experts in FHIR committed to promoting interoperability in healthcare, we are offering this free service to test connectivity as our APIs are already connected to 10,000 healthcare endpoints.”

Recommended AI News: Upgrade Closes $105 Million Series E Round At $3.325 Billion Valuation

One of the regulations is the Patient Access Rule, which is intended to give patients more control over their healthcare data. It mandates that government-regulated health plans (i.e. Medicare and Medicaid) must provide active members with the ability to access claims, encounter, clinical, and formulary data through a member-selected third-party application. At the direction of the member, the health plan is required to make the foregoing data available to the third-party applications developers via FHIR APIs. Enforcement of the Patient Access API went into effect on July 1, 2021.

Recommended AI News: Benefitfocus Achieves HITRUST CSF Certification to Enhance Third-Party Privacy, Security and Compliance for Customer Data