Health Level Seven® International (HL7®), the global authority for interoperability in healthcare information technology with members in 55 countries, today announced that Accenture and Surescripts have joined the Argonaut Project. Launched in December 2014, the Argonaut Project addresses the recommendations of the JASON Task Force, a joint task force of the HIT Standards and Policy Committees. The overarching goal of the project is to accelerate the development and adoption of HL7’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (HL7® FHIR®).
HL7’s FHIR
HL7’s FHIR is a next generation standards framework that leverages the latest web standards and applies a tight focus on implementation. It is a RESTful API, which is an approach based on modern internet conventions and widely used in other industries. HL7 FHIR offers enormous flexibility; for patients and providers, its versatility can be applied to mobile devices, web-based applications, cloud communications, and EHR data-sharing using modular components.
The Argonaut Project is funding current FHIR development efforts to provide practical and focused FHIR profiles and implementation guides to the healthcare IT industry. The addition of Accenture and Surescripts will help broaden the collaborative efforts of the Argonaut Project members to provide a more mature health IT standard.
“The more testing we conduct and implementation experiences we collect, the faster we will see RESTful API-based transactions become a day-to-day reality in health information exchange,” said Micky Tripathi, CEO and president of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative and Argonaut project manager.
Accenture and Surescripts will join HL7 and the following founding members of the Argonaut Project:
– athenahealth
– Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
– Cerner
– Epic
– Intermountain Healthcare
– Mayo Clinic
– MEDITECH
– McKesson
– Partners HealthCare System
– SMART at the Boston Children’s Hospital Informatics Program
– The Advisory Board Company
