Health integration simplified: Complying with CMS interoperability requirements

Yogesh Dhimate (00:07):
Hi everyone. My name is Yogesh Dhimate, I'm a Senior Solutions Manager at MuleSoft and part of our Solutions Team. Today, we are going to discuss how healthcare integration is simplified with MuleSoft Accelerator for Healthcare.

Yogesh Dhimate (00:24):
To comply with ONC and 21st Century Cures Act, healthcare providers and health plans must publish API's, confirmed with FHIR, to make information easily accessible by patients and members. They must also provide the ability for patients and members to provide consent for their data to be shared with third parties, such as health applications. Adhering to government mandate is of course important, but the great thing about making data easily accessible by members is that it also creates a better member experience.

Yogesh Dhimate (00:58):
Let's take, for example, the Formulary API. The Formulary API can be used to determine the cost of drugs for patients. Let's run through a real example. Raji is shopping for a health plan using this mobile app, when shopping for health plans, this app allows Raji to compare to drug coverage of several different health plans to help us quickly assess which plan has the lowest estimated cost for her set of medications. This app also helps Raji determine the plan level estimated cost for each of her medications under the drug coverage of the health plan. All of this is made possible by the Formulary API deployed on MuleSoft.

Yogesh Dhimate (01:58):
This API is being used to provide the cost information of the drugs and how it would change for different levels within a health plan. This FHIR compliant Formulary API, as well as other APIs you can use for interoperability are provided as part of MuleSoft Accelerator for Healthcare. Accelerator for Healthcare is a collection of key assets or building blocks, like API specifications, implementation templates, API policy, and reference architecture, that help you implement critical integration use cases for healthcare faster.

Yogesh Dhimate (02:34):
So, where can you find the Accelerator for Healthcare? The answer is Anypoint Exchange. Anypoint Exchange is the app store of all integration resources. It can host the assets created by your organization and comes with assets provided by MuleSoft.

Yogesh Dhimate (02:51):
To locate the accelerator, simply search for "accelerator" or "healthcare" using the search bar. Here is the MuleSoft accelerator for healthcare, let's click on it. When you open the main page, notice that Accelerator provides support for many use cases.

Yogesh Dhimate (03:32):
It supports the use cases like Patient 360, meeting interoperability requirements for Patient Access API final rule, or reporting notifiable conditions to Public Health Agencies like CalREDIE. As you scroll down further, you can see more details of each use case, and here is the formulary API we saw a few minutes ago. You saw the API in action in an app, let's see how to put it into action.

Yogesh Dhimate (04:19):
When you click on the API spec, you will get to the RAML specification of the formulary API. Here, you can notice the different endpoints and the methods available in the API.

Yogesh Dhimate (04:42):
Additional details like supported query parameters, response types, and example payloads are available as well. You can use the mocking service to quickly try out the API and understand how it behaves. Of course, the spec needs to be implemented to do that, click on the implementation template.

Yogesh Dhimate (05:33):
This template provides a scaffolding of a Mule application to implement this API. It follows all of MuleSoft's best practices, that means all the hard work is already done for you. Let's open this template in Studio and see how it looks. As the template opens in Studio, you can notice the structure and organization of the project. For example, there are configuration files for different environments that will make it easy to move the application from testing, to locally, to dev, or production.

Yogesh Dhimate (06:28):
You can easily create new configuration files for any environment by simply copying and pasting an existing environment configuration file. The code follows other best practices around error handling, logging, or reconnection strategy. The API in this KPI implementation, you can see how the formulative implementation is being finished from the backend database.

Yogesh Dhimate (06:57):
And once the template is all configured, you can deploy in the cloud or on premises, it's up to you. And this is how you would forward the draft pricing and planning permission you saw in the mobile application, with the formulary APS spec and the implementation template.

Yogesh Dhimate (07:13):
With the APS specs and implementation templates provided in the Accelerator for Healthcare, peers can not only build an API for exposing drug information in a FHIR compliant format in weeks, but they can also use this data to build patient facing experiences like the mobile app, much faster than ever before.