FHIR-based Pharmacy Care Coordination Platform Goes Live in 50 States
An FHIR-based pharmacy care coordination platform, known as the Pharmacist eCare Plan, is up and running in all 50 states.
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- An FHIR-based pharmacy care coordination platform, known as the Pharmacist eCare Plan (PeCP), is up and running in all 50 states.
The PeCP platform was selected by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology as one of its High Impact Pilot project, related Brett Coughlin, health communication specialist at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, in an October 21 blog post.
The platform provides an interoperable way to “prioritize drug therapy problem lists” and develops a care plan that includes “social determinants of health, an adherence assessment, interventions made by the pharmacy team, clinical goals, and referrals to other members of the healthcare team,” explained Amina Abubakar, PharmD, CEO of Rx Clinic Pharmacy, an early adopter of the PeCP platform.
The platform was originally developed by the Community Care of North Carolina (CCNC), Lanta Consulting Group, and other partners in North Carolina.
CCNC won a $15 million federal award from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) for development of the platform in 2014. The grant said that the project would use a pharmacy information exchange platform to understand the patient's prescription history to provide medication management services and support care coordination by functioning as an extension of the medical home care manager.
The project initially made three tools publicly available: standardized pharmacist care plans using Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) Health Level 7 (HL7) International’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) implementation guides; library of bi-directional transformations converting FHIR to and from CDA; and in-person FHIR and CDA training for implementers
The platform’s creator, Rick Geimer, explained that the PeCP platform:
- Reduces redundant manual data entry and increases time for patient engagement with pharmacists
- Improves clinical quality while increasing structured data capture and automated clinical quality measurement
- Speeds data sharing between pharmacies and CCNC, while supporting reporting requirements for the Merit-based Incentive Payment System
- Delivers standard-based structured and coded reports that could be validated (CDA to FHIR)
The PeCP platform is interoperable with a variety of electronic health records, is in the process of being accredited by the American National Standards Institute, and is widely used across the country by pharmacists, concluded Shelly Spiro, executive director of the Pharmacy Health Information Technology Collaborative.
