ASTP/ONC Grant Funded Project Updates
The Office of the Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy and Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ASTP/ONC) extended the current cooperative agreement for continued maturation of the C-CDA and FHIR standards, and with that, awarded HL7 an additional $1.5 million for fiscal year 2025 to continue work on the following goals and their respective efforts:
Goal 1: Facilitate ongoing development and publication of HL7 standards for the benefit of the general public by the following:
- Develop an implementation plan including objectives, strategies, and approaches
- Monitor and identify interoperability needs and priorities
- Facilitate standards development and balloting cycles with an emphasis on the following:
- FHIR clinical documents profiles on Bundle and Composition to align CDA and FHIR
- Bulk FHIR Match Request
- International Patient Summary (IPS)
- SMART Health Links
- Develop best practice guides
- Develop example (open) data sets for HL7 specifications
- Reference implementation software for HL7 specifications
- C-CDA authoring and web-publication tooling
- FHIR R6
Goal 2: Enhance the underlying HL7 tools and infrastructure necessary to support effective implementation and use HL7 standards as follows:
- Enhance registry.fhir.org based on user feedback
- Maintain and enhance Unified Terminology Governance (UTG) and terminology services for standards development
- Produce and publish the 2025 C-CDA Value Set Release Package
- Enhance FHIR build and IG publishing infrastructure
Goal 3: Empower the HL7 standards development community with the following:
- Convene two C-CDA Implementation-a-Thon (IAT) events
- Convene virtual event piloting and implementation of key federal regulations
- such as CMS-0057 and HTI-2 (if finalized)
In addition to the above, work progressed on two additional COVID related ASTP/ONC grant-funded opportunities for HL7:
The two million dollar, four-year (FY2021-2024) cooperative agreement titled “HL7 Public Health Standards and Solutions for Future Pandemics” was extended six months through February 2025 to complete the following projects:
- Transition of FHIR Shorthand portfolio of related technology to HL7
- Michigan Public Health Query Proof of Concept
- USCDI+ Respiratory Illness Interviews
Projects completed under this endeavor include the following:
- Advance the use of HL7 Bulk Data Access API and other relevant standards-based API technologies to improve surveillance capacity for future pandemics and other public health emergencies by assessing available open-source natural language processing (NLP) tools which unlock high-value information contained in the text of clinical notes
- Update, ballot and publish the PDMP HL7 FHIR Implementation Guide
- Update, ballot and publish the electronic Long-Term Services and Supports (eLTSS) implementation guide
- Review existing HL7 Provenance standards and artifacts; provide recommendations of “Authorship” in provenance records and supporting “Full Provenance”
- Progress the work to define a CDA template and an Implementation Guide (IG) for eyecare professionals needing to share information
- Plan, prepare, facilitate and provide a 2-day virtual FHIR Security Events in 2023 and 2024
- Develop and publish a FHIR Security Checklist that allows implementers to understand how to effectively address security concerns when developing FHIR-based solutions
- Conduct a virtual event series to create awareness about open-source software communities using FHIR, highlighting communities of practice and open, modifiable tooling that FHIR standards developers and implementers can adapt to their context
- Provide HL7 FHIR Technical support to the Helios FHIR Accelerator
- Testing of the Gravity SDOH Clinical Care FHIR Implementation Guide
- Gravity SDOH Clinical Care FHIR Implementation Guide Standard for Trial Use 2 Publication
- Gravity Pilots Affinity Group Support
- Analyze and document which HL7 v2 messaging standards or FHIR IGs, resources and profiles can be used to support submission of test results from at-home COVID testing applications to state and federal government agencies
- Support development, advancement, and harmonization of Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) standards by analyzing the current state and emerging activities of SDOH related data
- Expand the clinical domains supported by HL7 standards by balloting the COVID-19 FHIR Profile Library implementation guide
- Improve the privacy and security of health information by examining the current landscape of relevant security, privacy, and public health standards
- Advance HL7 Public Health Standards by developing and publishing a Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment (POLST) CDA implementation guide
Work continues within the five-year (FY 2021-2025) $3.5M contract “COVID-19 support for Accelerating Standards Development for the US Realm”; projects under this effort include the following:
- Ballot, reconcile and publish updates to HL7’s US Core implementation guide
- Financial support for the US Realm Steering Committee (USRSC) Project Manager, Senior Advisor, Content Administrator/Curator
- Support for Helios, the HL7 FHIR Accelerator for Public Health
- Update, ballot and publish the Consolidated CDA (C-CDA) specification using Trifolia-on-FHIR, FHIR StructureDefinitions, and the FHIR Implementation Guide tooling stack (Complete)
Progress for all the above ASTP/ONC work can be found on HL7’s Confluence page at:
https://confluence.hl7.org/display/PMO/Sub-Contractor+Project+Page.
HL7 appreciates ASTP/ONC’s continued support of C-CDA and FHIR since 2016.
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