InterSystems joins Vulcan FHIR ACCELERATOR Program to expand interoperability in life sciences

InterSystems, a creative data technology provider dedicated to helping customers solve the most critical scalability, interoperability and speed problems, today announced its membership in the Vulcan FHIR ACCELERATOR Program, a new multi-stakeholder initiative launched by Health Level Seven International (HL7) to empower clinical researchers with greater interoperability.

InterSystems joins leaders from government and regulatory agencies, standards development organisations, academic institutions, life sciences and technology companies to extend the capabilities of HL7 FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) beyond clinical care to include clinical research. Their efforts will ultimately facilitate a ‘learning health system’ by combining research data with clinical care data to improve patient outcomes and drive efficiency in clinical and translational research.

While the digitisation of healthcare has resulted in the rapid expansion of electronic health record standards (EHRs), the drug discovery and approval process lags behind. According to a recent study published by the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, the development of prescription drugs through to market approval costs drug makers an estimated $2.6 billion. Efficiently acquiring EHR data from the clinical setting remains a challenge for most clinical researchers, leading to prolonged and costly delays in the discovery of new treatments for disease. The Vulcan FHIR ACCELERATOR Program is designed to mitigate those delays by modernising the sharing and representation of clinical data and translational discovery for clinical researchers through FHIR standards.

As part of the programme, InterSystems will apply its extensive experience powering the exchange and representation of a unified healthcare record among payers, patients, academic medical centres and other healthcare organisations to build tools for transitioning real world data from EHRs to clinical researchers working on the latest medical treatments. InterSystems will also pilot the new solutions for streamlining data exchange from the point of collection to the clinical research setting.

“Clean, aggregated and normalised data is essential in clinical care and the backbone of efficient medical research,” said Don Woodlock, vice-president of Healthcare Solutions at InterSystems. “Driven by data and committed to expanding interoperability to improve patient outcomes, we are proud to join the Vulcan FHIR ACCELERATOR Program and work hand-in-hand with other prominent stakeholders to provide data from the EHR appropriately to clinical researchers who can leverage this ‘unified research record’ to discover breakthrough treatments in healthcare."

“As a trusted partner for some of the world’s largest healthcare organisations, InterSystems brings a deep expertise and understanding of the value of interoperability,” said HL7 International CEO Charles Jaffe, MD, PhD “We are excited to welcome InterSystems to the Vulcan FHIR ACCELERATOR Program and we look forward to leveraging their experience to help clinical researchers more effectively acquire and exchange critical healthcare data.”

In 2018, InterSystems joined the HL7 Da Vinci Project, another multi-stakeholder initiative devoted to improving payer and provider collaboration by using clinical data to transition to value-based care payment models. Over the past decade, InterSystems has actively engaged with industry leaders and health IT technical experts to accelerate the adoption of FHIR as the standard to support data exchange across communities.

More information on the Vulcan FHIR ACCELERATOR Program and the project’s goals can be found here: www.hl7.org/vulcan.