The PACIO (pronounced pa-sē-ō) Project is one of at least 45 new health IT collaborations that have emerged in 2019. The initiative, which started off as the Post-Acute Care Interoperability (PAC IO) Workgroup, is sponsored by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and grew out of its work on the Data Element Library (DEL). After weeks of debate on plausible use cases, the PACIO Project decided to concentrate on the framework needed to develop Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource (FHIR) technical implementation guides and reference implementations for facilitating health data exchange through standards-based, use case-driven, application programming interfaces (APIs). What does that mean exactly? It means that NASL and others who are part of the PACIO Project have agreed to work on a new FHIR API – that’s really the technical name for the standard we’ll use to exchange a particular set of patient health data from one care setting to another. Currently, the PACIO Project is working on a narrow use case – a kind of map of all the technical and clinical steps that are needed for the software program to exchange the data via the FHIR API. Since this initiative is focused on post-acute care, the first use case centers on transferring functional and cognitive status of a patient who is transitioning from a hospital to a skilled nursing facility (SNF). Before technical specifications can be developed, we need clinical experts to weigh in. So, several members of the NASL IMPACT Act Workgroup reviewed the data elements relating to a patient’s functional status and cognition, based on a patient’s social and medical history and other relevant factors that we believe should be considered in developing the use case, which we’ve shared with the PACIO Project. We are delighted to share that several NASL members have joined the PACIO Project calls to ensure that facility-based clinical expertise from the three therapy disciplines are represented in the development of this use case and FHIR API. NASL continues to track and will report on the PACIO Project’s progress.
