May 11, 2020 NASHVILLE, Tenn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today Change Healthcare (Nasdaq: CHNG) announced it is making its Connected Consumer Health™ interoperability APIs (application programming interfaces) available at no charge to help health plans quickly achieve compliance with the CMS Interoperability and Patient Access Final Rule. This innovative approach enables patient data access through open, industry standard APIs, helping to manage patient identity, security, and personal preferences. Health plans can now achieve CMS compliance while mitigating cybersecurity and implementation risks.

The CMS Interoperability and Patient Access Final Rule requires health plans to make patient data available through industry standard APIs. CMS and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) have acted to foster easy patient access to consumer health information through interoperability and to unleash digital health innovation. In addition to meeting a January 1, 2021 compliance deadline under the Final Rule, health plans must mitigate significant cybersecurity and consent risks, as patient data can only be made available to third parties authorized by the patient.

Change Healthcare’s Connected Consumer Health interoperability solution dramatically reduces the cost, complexity, and deployment barriers to empower payers to rapidly meet CMS’s regulatory requirements. In addition to standards-based interoperability APIs, the solution includes the necessary security, identity management, and consent management capabilities to enable health plans to administer patient identity and to provide data to third-party applications in accordance with CMS regulations and HIPAA.
“This is a time-sensitive, complex, and potentially costly issue, with many challenges that payers are seeking to address now,” said Kris Joshi, Ph.D., president, Network Solutions, at Change Healthcare. ”With Connected Consumer Health, Change Healthcare is helping payers achieve CMS compliance quickly while dramatically reducing cybersecurity and consent risks, complexity, and cost. The pandemic has shown us the potential of, and the need to, accelerate digital health. By leveraging industry standards-based interoperability APIs and identity management tools, payers can immediately accelerate their digital health initiatives.”

Health plans should begin by assessing their data readiness and develop a plan to meet the CMS deadlines. Change Healthcare’s standards-based APIs are designed to be easy to adopt and offer flexible deployment options. Assistance with implementation and data management is available as needed.

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