As the healthcare industry moves toward comprehensive care — and not just treating a physical malady — physicians are increasingly collaborating with community organizations.
One example of that collaboration is occurring between the nation’s top physician association and a technology vendor.
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AMA Innovations, a technology development subsidiary of Chicago-based American Medical Association, is collaborating with Onyx Technology to build a solution that will enable that secure communication.
Dubbed FIRE Wire, the solution will be available to physicians and their teams, who can use it to exchange messages, referrals and personal health information of patients with social services organizations in the area.
For example, if an emergency room physician is discharging a patient who is homeless, the doctor can use the solution to find shelters in the area that have space and can accommodate the patient’s clinical needs, said Aaron Seib, chief strategy officer of Elkridge, Maryland-based Onyx.
“The idea is a physician is in a unique position to identify that [social] need, get the patient’s authorization to help them address that need and to communicate with the community-based organizations about that need,” he said in a phone interview. “And, with the consent of the patient, also share whatever personal health information makes the most sense.”
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FIRE Wire will support Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources-based application programming interfaces. FHIR is a standard for exchanging healthcare information electronically.
Onyx will develop the solution and end-user applications, while AMA Innovations will offer the provider perspective.
“The AMA has strengths with respect to understanding providers’ needs and burdens,” said Dr. Tom Giannulli, vice president of AMA Innovations, in a phone interview. “And this inability to have simple communication that’s frictionless and unfettered [is a burden]. We also know we are not the organization that can build the highly scalable, cloud-based infrastructure that is required.”
Onyx, on the other hand, has already built that type of infrastructure, with full FHIR-integration, he added. So, collaborating with Onyx made sense for the AMA subsidiary.
There has been a concerted push over the last several years to incorporate social determinants of health considerations into clinical care. The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated this push.
Social factors that affect health, or social determinants of health, include poverty, the physical environment and race or ethnicity. Amid the pandemic, these factors can also determine outcomes for those who contract the deadly coronavirus, research shows.
According to an article published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine in May 2020, “the effect of social determinants of health and Covid-19 morbidity is perhaps underappreciated.” For example, a Boston-based study shows that of 408 individuals residing in a homeless shelter, 36% tested positive for Covid-19.
Further, the pandemic has disproportionately affected communities of color. Black Americans are 1.4 times more likely to contract Covid-19 than white Americans, and nearly 3 times as likely to die from it, according to data from the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control.
Solutions that allow providers to factor in patients’ social determinants of health and refer them to the appropriate social services can go a long way toward improving outcomes, especially amid the pandemic.
“The [bigger the] investment that we make to enable better community-based organization service delivery at the right time, the bigger the payoff,” Seib of Onyx said.
The companies plan to have a proof of concept prepared in a couple of months, and to begin piloting the solution in the second half of 2021, AMA’s Giannulli said. The proof of concept is expected to show how a provider can use the FIRE Wire solution to connect with social services organizations and send requests for referrals, and how those organizations can securely respond.
To prepare for the pilot phase, Onyx and AMA Innovations have started discussions about the opportunity with several community-based organizations and providers, but will announce the participants later in the year.
They have also submitted the solution to the Innovative Technology Solutions for Social Care Referrals Challenge created by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Community Living. Cash prizes will be awarded in each phase of the competition, which aims to support the development of care coordination tools connecting providers and social services. The total prize pool available is $500,000.
Photo: syahrir maulana, Getty Images
