Medicare holds vast amounts of health data on the people it serves. But the original Blue Button system was built before Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), the industry standard for making health data move cleanly between systems.
It struggled to handle large amounts of data and convert it into usable formats. This made it difficult for beneficiaries to share their health information with providers and other trusted parties.
Beneficiaries can connect their Medicare data to the apps, providers, and research programs they choose, instead of leaving that information locked away and unused. That access gives them, and the people helping manage their care, a fuller picture to make better decisions with.
FHIR implementation is a key topic in the health IT space. Through it, data can be standardized and made interoperable between disparate systems.
Better access to health data:
This leads to better service recommendations and health outcomes.
For Blue Button 2.0, we focused on developing a secure, FHIR-based API that allows beneficiaries to connect their Medicare data seamlessly with various applications and services.
Because building with Medicare data became this easy, over 6,400 developers created apps and tools beneficiaries can now choose from, far beyond what anyone expected when the program launched. The more developers who show up, the more ways beneficiaries have to actually use their own information.
Information like Social Security numbers is never exposed by the API, no matter who's connecting to it or how. Beneficiaries get the benefits of sharing their data without ever having to worry about what that sharing might expose.