Private Coalition of Health Insurers and Major Tech Companies Announce New Standard for Claims Data Sharing

The CARIN Alliance, which is a coalition of companies from the health and tech industries, has just announced the release of a new standard for sharing health claims data in conjunction with the Blue Button Developers Conference.  The announcement is linked here.

The newly released standard is linked here:  CARIN Blue Button Implementation Guide CI Build.

According to FierceHealthcare, the standard was developed by working group comprised of alliance members and includes more than 240 claim data elements.  FierceHealthcare reports that 20 organizations, including Apple, Anthem, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Cambia Health Solutions, Google, and Humana have agreed to test an application programming interface (“API”) employing the standard in anticipation of a product lunch of the standard next year.

CNBC reports that the significance of the news is that this is the first time that industry has agreed to standards for sharing claims data to third party developers, and the Alliance aspires not only to make the data available to consumers but also to provide fraud detection functionality and functionality to help consumers avoid paying bills with errors in them.

FierceHealthCare reports that the new standard “builds” on Blue Button 2.0, which was released by the Centers by Medicare and Medicaid Services (“CMS”) last year and is an API enabling Medicare beneficiaries to access to their Medicare claims data.   A web page dedicated to Blue Button 2.0 is linked here.  FierceHealthCare reported on the  Blue Button 2.0 initiative by CMS  here.

Obviously the development of new digital health standards is a victory for the digital health industry, which has arguably been slow to develop industry standards along the lines of what exist in the tech industry generally.

For more information on how to join The Carin Alliance, click here.  For a list of alliance members, please click here.

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Kristie Prinz
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