Toward a Wider Adoption of Digital Insurance Cards

This article looks at what it will take to let us all check in to our doctor’s office as easily as we wave our cell phone before a scanner in a retail store. Start with Standards A typical digital validation in health care must be recognized by software on the patient’s device as well as sites at multiple institutions: providers, payers, pharmacies, and more. Therefore, standards are a prerequisite to digital insurance cards. Luckily (as the saying goes), there are many to choose from. HL7, which has been setting standards for health care since 1987, leapt into the modern age of computer standards by adopting the FHIR standard. One of the FHIR standards, conveniently enough, is a digital insurance card. A complementary standard was created by an organization that has been developing standards for health care platforms even before the FHIR standard existed: SMART Health (previously the SMART Platform). The digital card contains the typical information an insurance card needs to display, along with information that the payer uses to verify that the card is legitimate. Furthermore, the card can contain useful information about the patient’s identity, policy, benefits, and coverage. The patient can control which information is shared with a given provider. This information is exchanged using JSON, like most web interactions. The standard can generate a QR code that the patient prints on paper or stores on a mobile device. The payer can then verify the informat...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - Category: Information Technology Authors: Tags: Communication and Patient Experience Health IT Company Healthcare IT Interoperability CARIN Alliance Commons Project Foundation Digital Insurance Card FHIR hl7 JP Pollak Leavitt Partners Mark Scrimshire OnyxOS Patient Identificat Source Type: blogs