Submitting WG/Project/Implementer Group

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Short Description

The PAC Transition Summary Connectathon track will allow us to confirm the quality of the PACIO Functional Status, Cognitive Status, and CMS Data Element Library IG materials, gain experience with testing, and show us where additional revisions to the IGs may be helpful for implementers.

Long Description

Track Goals

• Test integration of CMS assessment data elements from the Data Element Library (DEL) into health IT systems using FHIR APIs.
• Exchange patient level Cognitive and Functional Status data between multiple disparate health IT (HIT) systems, incorporated with eLTSS care plan and patient goals data, in a consumable format for clinicians, patients, and family members.

Problem Overview

High quality and timely health information exchange is essential to promote positive health outcomes, reduce provider burden and deliver cost effective healthcare. Acute care settings have made significant strides towards interoperability recently, but post-acute care (PAC) setting still struggle to keep pace with progress toward interoperability.

Despite being excluded from EHR incentive programs, EHR adoption in PAC settings is relatively high. In 2018, ONC released a data brief reporting that 78% of Home Health Agencies (HHAs) and 66% of Skilled Nursing Facilities (SNFs) had adopted EHRs in 2017. (Comparatively, in the same year, 96% of non-federal acute care hospitals had implemented certified EHRs). However, key indicators of interoperability (electronically find, send, receive, and integrate data) remain low in PAC settings.

Considering that 45% of Medicare beneficiaries require (PAC) services after hospitalization, costing taxpayers over $73 billion dollars annually, the need for a seamless exchange of health information across care settings, and with patients, is significant.

The 2014 Improving Medicare Post-acute care Transformation Act (IMPACT Act) requires the use of standardized Medicare quality measures and assessment data in PAC settings, and also requires that the standardized data be interoperable. The intent of the IMPACT Act is to:

• Support access to longitudinal information to help inform clinical decision making and promote coordinated patient care
• Enable data comparison across healthcare settings
• Improve discharge planning and health information exchange

In response to IMPACT requirements, CMS developed standardized patient assessments in specific categories, including assessments for functional status and cognitive status, which are used across multiple care settings for quality measurement, payment, survey and certification, and public reporting.  In addition, providers can use these standardized data elements, and their mappings to HIT standards (e.g.- LOINC, SNOMED-CT), to support quality improvement efforts, care planning, and for health information exchange when a person transitions between healthcare settings, including hospitals, outpatient services, home and community based services, PAC settings (Hospices, Home Health Agencies (HHA), Inpatient Rehabilitation Facilities (IRF), Long-term care Hospitals (LTCH), Skilled Nursing Facilities), and others. CMS assessment data elements are not limited to PAC settings; other healthcare settings outside of PAC also can use them to improve care.

Post-acute care (PAC) providers are required to submit patient data to CMS for all patients using specific CMS assessments, at both admission and discharge, and at other points in between. These assessments include administrative and clinical data elements, which are used for quality measurement, payment, survey and certification, and public reporting.  In addition, providers can use the data elements found within CMS assessments to support quality improvement efforts, care planning, and for health information exchange when a person transitions between healthcare settings, including hospitals, outpatient services, home and community based services, PAC settings (Hospices, Home Health Agencies (HHA), Inpatient Rehabilitation Facilities (IRF), Long-term care Hospitals (LTCH), Skilled Nursing Facilities), and others. CMS assessment data elements are not limited to PAC settings; other healthcare settings outside of PAC also can use them to improve care.

CMS created the DEL to support standardization and interoperability of patient assessment data elements found on the following CMS assessments:

• Inpatient Rehabilitation Facility Patient Assessment Instrument (IRF-PAI)
• Long-Term Care Hospital Continuity Assessment Record & Evaluation (CARE) Data Set (LCDS)
• Resident Assessment Instrument (RAI) Minimum Data Set (MDS)
• Outcome and Assessment Information Set (OASIS)
• Functional Assessment Standardized Items (FASI)
• Hospice Item Set (HIS)

The CMS DEL is the centralized repository of CMS assessment questions and response options (data elements), along with their related mappings to nationally accepted health IT standards (e.g. LOINC, SNOMED-CT), to support electronic data exchange to improve care coordination, health outcomes, and healthcare efficiencies.

Interoperability challenges persist across the healthcare ecosystem. Providers are not receiving complete and accurate information in a timely manner, leading to adverse outcomes and additional expenses. Failure to exchange accurate, timely data often leads to inefficient workflows, duplicative data entries, and increased risk of patient harm attributable to missing or inaccurate information. HIT can significantly alleviate administrative burden by supporting health information exchange across care settings to ensure that the relevant information necessary to care for the incoming patient is delivered to the right person, at the right time- therefore improving patient outcomes, reducing provider burden, improving cost efficiencies, and improving workflows. Moreover, enhanced data exchange would allow for advanced computability, standardization, usability, and real-time data analytics, enabling broader data use by health IT developers, researchers, providers, and payers.

To incrementally further the goal of cross-setting interoperable data exchange, CMS prioritized cognitive and functional status as an area of clinical importance in need of standardization. CMS created a set of questions and responses addressing cognitive and functional status with corresponding LOINC/SNOMED codes that is standardized across all PAC settings. Members of the PACIO Project, a collaborative effort to advance interoperable health data exchange between PAC providers, patients, and other key stakeholders, worked with CMS to develop an IG for exchange of cognitive status data elements starting with the short Confusion Assessment Method (CAM). PACIO selected short CAM data elements because exchanging this information quickly and efficiently is essential to ensuring a person’s safe transition from one healthcare setting to another. Additionally, the interoperable exchange of short CAM elements paves the way for semantic interoperability because those data elements are represented the same way in each PAC assessment.

Type

Test an Implementation Guide

Submitting Work Group/Project/Accelerator/Affiliate/Implementer Guide

PACIO Project Workgroup

More information about the PACIO Project can be found at: https://confluence.hl7.org/display/PC/PACIO+Project+Functional+Status

Proposed Track Leads

Related Tracks

• Care Coordination
• Clinical Reasoning

FHIR Version

This track will use version R4 of FHIR.

Specification(s) This Track Uses

https://build.fhir.org/ig/HL7/fhir-pacio-functional-status/

https://build.fhir.org/ig/HL7/fhir-pacio-cognitive-status/

http://hl7.org/fhir/us/eltss/

Artifacts of Focus

Clinical Input Requested (if any)

CMS assessments are developed by CMS with guidance from multiple sources, including clinical subject matter experts, measure developers, and others. While CMS is not seeking clinical input for assessment content as part of this Connectathon, clinical input is welcome regarding the process of integrating CMS assessment content into clinical IT workflows. Members of the Post-Acute Care Interoperability (PACIO) Project, including CMS and MITRE, with clinical experience will be present to discuss which key cognitive status data elements they have identified to be exchanged during transitions of care, but validation by a wider clinician audience of connectathon participants would be beneficial.

Patient Input Requested (if any)

Patient input on the assessment content is welcome for Scene 5 of the use case, which focuses on patient access to assessment results.

Expected Participants

40 participants, including CMS, ONC, Telligen, Lantana, Patient Centric Solutions, eLTSS, Altarum, FEI Systems, MITRE

Zulip Stream

Communicate here when discussing anything related to the Implementation Guide (IG), Reference Implementation (RI) or for general track discussions

Zulip #Post-Acute Care

https://chat.fhir.org/#narrow/stream/208867-Post-Acute-Care

Scenario

Use Case

System Roles

Scenario 1/Scene 1:

Social Worker (SW) creates care plan and goals for Ms. Smith Johnson and pushes the care plan and goals (eLTSS data) to the Data Manager.

Scenario 2/Scene 2:

The Hospital performs cognitive and functional assessments on Ms. Smith Johnson using the PAC Assessment App.  The assessment application pulls the standardized assessment data from the CMS Data Element Library (DEL) to present forms to the clinician performing the assessments.  The assessment application pushes assessments through Structured Data Capture into the data store at the Hospital. EHR/Database System pushes assessments to the Data Manager

Scenario 3/Scene 3:

The SNF clinicians retrieve and review the eLTSS data and assessment data from the Data Manager to inform her care. The SNF updates the eLTSS care plan. The SNF discharges Ms. Smith Johnson and pushes the cognitive and functional assessments to the Health Data Manager.

Scenario 4/Scene 4:

The HHA admits Ms. Smith Johnson. The HHA can retrieve the data for care plan, goals, functional and cognitive assessments performed at the hospital and SNF from the Data Manager.

Scenario 5/Scene 5:

Mobile/web consumer-facing application accessible by Ms. Smith Johnson or her designated proxy/caregiver/family member can access care plan, goals, functional and cognitive assessments performed at the Hospital and SNF.

Success Criteria:

Successfully transfer of care plan, goals, functional and cognitive assessment data between settings (Hospital, SNF, Home) and with consumers, in a manner that is consumable by clinicians and consumers.

Bonus 1:

Healthcare Setting B discharges Ms. Smith and refers her to Healthcare Setting C.  Healthcare Setting C and its retrieves care plan, goals, functional and cognitive assessments performed at Healthcare Setting A and Healthcare Setting B from the Health Data Manager.

Bonus 2:

Healthcare Setting B pushes updated care plan, goals, functional and cognitive assessments performed at Healthcare Setting B to the Data Manager.  Healthcare Setting A retrieves the updated care plan, goals, functional and cognitive assessments performed at Healthcare Setting B from the Health Data Manager.

Bonus 3:

The assessment application stores the HHA functional and cognitive assessment answers into the Data Manager

Security and Privacy Considerations

Clients and servers shall support SMART on FHIR security protocols, although this track will not use any PII/PHI, only synthetic data

Track Orientation

A webinar was hosted on 8/26/20 at 1:30 pm - 2:30 pm EST to share further participation information about this track. Materials are attached below.

PowerPoint:

Meeting recording:

zoom_0.mp4

Track Schedule

Track Resources

• CMS Data Element Library FHIR API Prototype
  • Implementation Guide: https://paciowg.github.io/del/
  • Hosted Reference Implementations
    • Server: https://api.logicahealth.org/PACIO/
    • Client: https://deldemo.herokuapp.com
  • Reference Implementation Code (Apache 2.0 license)
    • Server: https://github.com/paciowg/del
    • Client: https://github.com/paciowg/delDemo
  • Test Scripts: https://github.com/paciowg/inferno
• PACIO Functional Status
  • Implementation Guide: https://build.fhir.org/ig/HL7/fhir-pacio-functional-status/
  • Hosted Reference Implementations
    • Server: http://hapi.fhir.org/baseR4
    • Client: https://snf-transfer-summary.herokuapp.com/
  • Reference Implementation Code (Apache 2.0 license)
    • Server: https://github.com/jamesagnew/hapi-fhir
    • Client: https://github.com/paciowg/transfer-summary-ri-client
• PACIO Cognitive Status
• Implementation Guide: https://build.fhir.org/ig/HL7/fhir-pacio-cognitive-status/
• Hosted Reference Implementations
  • Server: http://hapi.fhir.org/baseR4
  • Client: https://snf-transfer-summary.herokuapp.com/
• Reference Implementation Code (Apache 2.0 license)
  • Server: https://github.com/jamesagnew/hapi-fhir
• Client: https://github.com/paciowg/transfer-summary-ri-client
• eLTSS (Electronic Long Term Support and Services)
  • Implementation Guide: http://hl7.org/fhir/us/eltss/
  • Reference Implementation Code: https://github.com/onc-healthit/eLTSS-reference-implementation
• Structured Data Capture (SDC)
  • Project: https://www.healthit.gov/topic/scientific-initiatives/pcor/research-evaluation/structured-data-capture-sdc
  • Implementation Guide: http://hl7.org/fhir/uv/sdc/2019May/
• FHIR Endpoints:
  • Both endpoints support read/write operations.  Please coordinate with the track leads for write operations since different groups may be demonstrating user stories at any point in time.

Track Report Out