The 21st Century CURES act outlines health information technology standards, implementation specifications, and certification criteria.

The standards and specifications adopted in 45 CFR 170.215 aimed to facilitate the interoprability and exchange of health information. These specific technologies include:

• HL7® FHIR Release 4.0.1
• United States Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI) STU 6.1.0
• SMART App Launch Implementation Guide Release 2.0.0
• FHIR® Bulk Data Access STU 1

This project prototyped a public-private partnership between state, tribal, and local (STLT) health departments, MITRE, and CDC to demonstrate FHIR messaging capabilities. It provided training by grouping municipal and state HDs to work together to develop FHIR client and server software along with supporting tools like Inferno Test Kits to ensure compliance to an IG as well as planning and building implementation guides to adhere to in the transmisison of data.

Project Contributions

My role on the project was to be a staff developer and individual contributor that supported the technical lead in the task of teaching and demonstrating FHIR software. Some of the things I did on my time in the project include:

• Designed and demonstrated functional reference implementations of new FHIR IGs (both server and client)
• Designed and conducted client/server testing between state and local HDs
• Created technical documentation teaching how to develop fhir clients and server software for a health department
• Researched existing OTS solutions that may fit a health departments desired use case