NASHVILLE, Tenn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today Change Healthcare (Nasdaq: CHNG) announced it is making its Connected Consumer Health™ interoperability APIs (application programming interfaces) available at no charge to help health plans quickly achieve compliance with the CMS Interoperability and Patient Access Final Rule. This innovative approach enables patient data access through open, industry standard APIs, helping to manage patient identity, security, and personal preferences. Health plans can now achieve CMS compliance while mitigating cybersecurity and implementation risks.
The CMS Interoperability and Patient Access Final Rule requires health plans to make patient data available through industry standard APIs. CMS and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) have acted to foster easy patient access to consumer health information through interoperability and to unleash digital health innovation. In addition to meeting a January 1, 2021 compliance deadline under the Final Rule, health plans must mitigate significant cybersecurity and consent risks, as patient data can only be made available to third parties authorized by the patient.
Change Healthcare’s Connected Consumer Health interoperability solution dramatically reduces the cost, complexity, and deployment barriers to empower payers to rapidly meet CMS’s regulatory requirements. In addition to standards-based interoperability APIs, the solution includes the necessary security, identity management, and consent management capabilities to enable health plans to administer patient identity and to provide data to third-party applications in accordance with CMS regulations and HIPAA.
“This is a time-sensitive, complex, and potentially costly issue, with many challenges that payers are seeking to address now,” said Kris Joshi, Ph.D., president, Network Solutions, at Change Healthcare. ”With Connected Consumer Health, Change Healthcare is helping payers achieve CMS compliance quickly while dramatically reducing cybersecurity and consent risks, complexity, and cost. The pandemic has shown us the potential of, and the need to, accelerate digital health. By leveraging industry standards-based interoperability APIs and identity management tools, payers can immediately accelerate their digital health initiatives.”
Health plans should begin by assessing their data readiness and develop a plan to meet the CMS deadlines. Change Healthcare’s standards-based APIs are designed to be easy to adopt and offer flexible deployment options. Assistance with implementation and data management is available as needed.
“AultCare is excited to be collaborating with Change Healthcare on the CMS guidelines pertaining to interoperability,” said Mike Gallina, vice president of Organizational Development and Community Engagement at AultCare. “Given the fact that the topic of interoperability will affect the entire health care industry overall, and our members in particular, it is important to us to be working with a company that we know and trust. That type of relationship exists between AultCare and Change Healthcare.”
Health plans are encouraged to engage early to ensure sufficient time is available for deployment and testing before the deadline. For more information or to enroll in the program, please visit https://inspire.changehealthcare.com/CCHInteroperability.
For more information on Change Healthcare, please visit our website, hear from our experts at Insights; Follow us on Twitter; Like us on Facebook; Connect with us on LinkedIn; and Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and YouTube.
About Change Healthcare
Change Healthcare (Nasdaq: CHNG) is a leading independent healthcare technology company that provides data and analytics-driven solutions to improve clinical, financial and patient engagement outcomes in the U.S. healthcare system. We are a key catalyst of a value-based healthcare system, accelerating the journey toward improved lives and healthier communities. Learn more at changehealthcare.com.
