Drummond Group, LLC, today announced that KONZA Health has joined FHIRplace as a participating intermediary, routing electronic prior authorization (ePA) FHIR transactions between payer and provider endpoints in the testing program. The addition brings an intermediary product into FHIRplace, giving health IT developers the ability to test how their systems handle data exchange when routed through a real-world network intermediary.
In production prior authorization workflows, payer and provider systems often do not communicate directly. Intermediaries, such as health information exchanges, clearinghouses, and trusted exchange networks, sit between them, routing and managing transactions according to the policies and technical constraints that govern exchange. FHIRplace is designed around that reality and the intermediary role changes what FHIRplace participants can test. Participants can now observe how that exchange behaves when routed through a trusted network, reflecting conditions their systems will encounter in production.
“Joining FHIRplace as an intermediary participant gives us the opportunity to demonstrate how governed network exchange performs across the prior authorization use cases that matter most to payers and providers. Developers need to test against the actual routing conditions their systems will encounter in production, and FHIRplace provides that environment,” said Laura McCrary, EdD, President and CEO of KONZA Health.
“FHIRplace is built to replicate and test the real conditions of prior authorization exchange between payers, providers, and intermediaries. KONZA Health is a strong intermediary partner, and their participation expands the range of real-world routing scenarios FHIRplace can support, making testing more reflective of how interoperability performs in production,” said Lisa Palmer, Vice President of Research, Innovation & Development at Drummond.
FHIRplace brings together payers, providers, EHR systems, platform developers, and the intermediaries that route between them. Testing across that full participant matrix surfaces interoperability challenges that other testing can miss and gives all parties confidence that their systems will be ready for live ePA interoperability.
Read the original press release.