Pharmacy Health IT: A FHIR-based care coordination platform goes national

One of four High Impact Pilot recipients, which developed a care plan platform to help pharmacists coordinate care with patients, is now operating in all 50 states.

This tool was one example of how pharmacists’ responded to the wave of value-based, coordinated care that emerged in US healthcare in the 1990s and 2000s. As this is National Pharmacy Week we wanted to highlight how pharmacists are using health IT to help patients receive coordinated care even outside of the doctor’s office.

An open-sourced project started as a collaboration between Lantana Consulting Group, the Community Collaborative of North Carolina (CCNC), and other partners was piloted in North Carolina and initially put three key tools into the public domain for users:

Standardized Pharmacist Care plans using Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) Health Level 7 (HL7®) International’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) implementation guides. A library of bi-directional transformations converting FHIR to and from CDA, and, In-person FHIR and CDA training for implementers. The care plan tool then started to improve on the standard and helped pharmacists in a number of ways, according to the platform’s creator, Rick Geimer.