InterSystems Joins Vulcan FHIR® ACCELERATOR™ Program to Expand Interoperability in Life Sciences

Sydney, Australia, April 6, 2021 – InterSystems, a creative data technology provider dedicated to helping customers solve the most critical scalability, interoperability, and speed problems, today announced its membership in the Vulcan FHIR® ACCELERATOR™ Program, a new multi-stakeholder initiative launched by Health Level Seven® International (HL7®) to empower clinical researchers with greater interoperability. 

InterSystems joins leaders from government and regulatory agencies, standards development organisations, academic institutions, life sciences and technology companies, to extend the capabilities of HL7 FHIR® (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) beyond clinical care to include clinical research. Their efforts will ultimately facilitate a ‘learning health system’ by combining research data with clinical care data to improve patient outcomes and drive efficiency in clinical and translational research.   

While the digitisation of healthcare has resulted in the rapid expansion of electronic health record standards (EHRs), the drug discovery and approval process lags behind. According to a recent study published by the Tufts Centre for the Study of Drug Development, the development of prescription drugs through to market approval costs drug makers an estimated US$2.6 billion. Efficiently acquiring EHR data from the clinical setting remains a challenge for most clinical researchers, leading to prolonged and costly delays in the discovery of new treatments for disease. The Vulcan FHIR ACCELERATOR Program is designed to mitigate those delays by modernising the sharing and representation of clinical data and translational discovery for clinical researchers through FHIR standards. 

As part of the program, InterSystems will apply its extensive experience powering the exchange and representation of a unified healthcare record among payers, patients, academic medical centres and other healthcare organisations to build tools for transitioning real world data from EHRs to clinical researchers working on the latest medical treatments. InterSystems will also pilot the new solutions for streamlining data exchange from the point of collection to the clinical research setting. 

“Clean, aggregated, and normalised data is essential in clinical care and the backbone of efficient medical research,” said Don Woodlock, vice president of Healthcare Solutions at InterSystems. “Driven by data and committed to expanding interoperability to improve patient outcomes, we are proud to join the Vulcan FHIR ACCELERATOR Program and work hand-in-hand with other prominent stakeholders to provide data from the EHR appropriately to clinical researchers who can leverage this ‘unified research record’ to discover breakthrough treatments in healthcare.”

“As a trusted partner for some of the world’s largest healthcare organisations, InterSystems brings a deep expertise and understanding of the value of interoperability,” said HL7 International CEO Charles Jaffe, M.D., Ph.D. “We are excited to welcome InterSystems to the Vulcan FHIR ACCELERATOR Program and we look forward to leveraging their experience to help clinical researchers more effectively acquire and exchange critical healthcare data.” 

In 2018, InterSystems joined the HL7® Da Vinci Project, another multi-stakeholder initiative devoted to improving payer and provider collaboration by using clinical data to transition to value-based care payment models. Over the past decade, InterSystems has actively engaged with industry leaders and health IT technical experts to accelerate the adoption of FHIR as the standard to support data exchange across communities.

More information on the Vulcan FHIR ACCELERATOR Program and the project’s goals can be found here: www.hl7.org/vulcan 

About Health Level Seven International (HL7)

Health Level Seven® International (HL7) is an ANSI-accredited, not-for-profit standards developing organisation with the mission of empowering global health interoperability. With affiliates in over 30 countries, HL7’s global membership envisions a world in which everyone can securely access and use the right data when and where they need it. Widely implemented by vendor and healthcare systems, and required by governing bodies around the world, HL7 standards deliver solutions for health information technology, including HL7® Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®), Version 2 (V2) and Clinical Document Architecture (CDA®). For more information, visit HL7.org. www.HL7.org. 

About InterSystems

Established in 1978, InterSystems is the leading provider of data technology for extremely critical data in the healthcare, finance, and logistics sectors.  Its cloud-first data platforms solve interoperability, speed, and scalability problems for large organisations around the globe.  InterSystems also develops and supports unique managed services for hospital EMRs, unified care records for communities and nations, and laboratory information management systems. InterSystems is committed to excellence through its award-winning, 24x7 support for customers and partners in more than 80 countries. Privately held and headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, InterSystems has 25 offices worldwide. For more information, please visit InterSystems.com.