How 360X Specifications Can Support HIE for Care Coordination
The 360X workgroup is creating HIE specifications for social determinants of health needs-based referrals to enhance care coordination.
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By - As the digital health transformation progresses, stakeholders are looking to well-established data standards to support health information exchange (HIE) for care coordination.
Holly Miller, MD, chief medical officer of MedAllies, is part of the 360X workgroup, an ONC-backed effort looking to build data standards to enable streamlined care.
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Miller emphasized that 360x is not a product. Instead, it’s a specification approved by Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) that uses a variety of technologies approved by standard development organizations.
“The specifications themselves are designed to force synergy across disparate healthcare organization systems around workflow regarding transitions of care for patients,” Miller said. “It was designed to have a relatively low development bar so that it could readily be built and adopted by electronic health record vendors and their customers in the healthcare industry.”
Miller noted that the components of 360X include direct interoperability with the consolidated clinical document architecture (CCDA) – the most widely used format for HIE in the US today – in addition to other data necessary for transitions of care.
“The specifications include unique patient and transition of care IDs for automated tracking,” she said. “There are also HL7v2 status messages, such as accept, decline, cancel, no-show, and others, so that at every point of the transition, both ends know exactly what's going on with the patient.”
While 360x started with specifications for specialty referral management, the workgroup has created additional IHE-approved protocols, including ambulatory or acute referrals to skilled nursing facilities.
Currently, the group is creating 360x specifications for referrals from skilled nursing facilities to emergency departments.
“Another use case that we've been working on that I think is so important are clinical referrals to social determinants of health community-based organizations,” Miller said. “As providers are becoming more and more engaged and aware of the need to assess their patients for social determinants of health needs, once a need is identified, it's very important make sure that the needs are met.”
“If we're able to make a referral and then track that referral to make sure that the patient needs were met, this greatly enhances the opportunity to ensure that patients are having their social determinants of health needs met, which is so important to overall health,” she added.
