Under a new collaboration between Health Level Seven® International (HL7®) and the American Medical Association (AMA), technology developers using HL7 data interoperability standards and guides will have increased accessibility to AMA-published medical codes and descriptors. The collaboration will work to fully integrate HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) with the AMA’s Current Procedure Terminology (CPT®) code set to advance the organizations’ mutual goal of promoting the efficient exchange of interoperable health information.
“Collaboration with the AMA will provide invaluable opportunities for the communities of developers to seamlessly incorporate this critical terminology within the HL7 development and implementation processes,” said HL7 CEO Charles Jaffe, M.D., Ph.D.
“As the health system’s foundational terminology for coding and describing medical services, CPT is the uniform code set trusted to efficiently exchange data that identifies specific treatments and procedures provided to patients,” said AMA Executive Vice President and CEO James Madara, M.D. “By working toward greater CPT accessibility for developers, the collaboration between AMA and HL7 allows the use of CPT in the development and testing of FHIR-based technology to further advance the next generation of health information solutions. We also look forward to working more closely with HL7 on educational opportunities and collaborating on industry conferences and events.”
The agreement builds on more than a decade of cooperation between AMA and HL7 in support of standardization that drives health data interoperability and opens new opportunities for developers and promotes innovation in FHIR-based technology that use CPT for measurement, analysis, and benchmarking of medical services.