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In this episode, host Sandy Vance chats with Timothy Bennett, the Director of Strategic Healthcare Initiatives at Drummond Group, LLC, for his second appearance on the show. With nearly 20 years at Drummond and deep roots in ONC certification testing dating back to 2010, Tim brings a rare long-view perspective to one of the most important questions facing healthcare interoperability today: how do you actually test whether FHIR works at scale in the real world, not just in a proof-of-concept connectathon? This episode introduces FHIRplace, Drummond's new community-driven testing ecosystem, and digs into why business process rules, not just technical standards, are the real challenge standing between FHIR's promise and its production reality.
In this episode, they talk about:- FHIRplace brings together providers, payers, technology vendors, and intermediaries to test FHIR implementations at real-world scale
- Testing conformance to a standard is not the same as proving true interoperability between systems
- Business process rules, like what documentation a health plan requires for prior authorization, sit outside the technical standards but are critical to real-world success
- Intermediaries are central to FHIRplace's testing model because point-to-point FHIR exchange is not feasible across millions of providers and thousands of health plans
- FHIRplace captures raw transaction data flowing through intermediaries to evaluate real-world interoperability issues, not just lab conditions
- HIPAA currently requires X12 for prior authorization, meaning a full replacement by FHIR will take years and likely result in a long-term hybrid approach
- FHIRplace plans to integrate with conformance tools like Inferno so members can get interoperability testing and standards validation in one place
- Drummond intends FHIRplace to be a 20-year testing ecosystem, not a short-term solution built around a single regulatory deadline
Timothy Bennett serves as Drummond’s Director of Strategic Healthcare Initiatives and leads the development of new testing and certification programs to benefit the national healthcare interoperability strategy. As the former director of the firm’s ONC Accredited Test Lab (ATL), he has been involved in testing electronic health records (EHR) systems since the ONC program's inception in September 2010 and has additionally served as the test lab’s lead technical adviser. Prior to healthcare compliance testing, Timothy facilitated numerous interoperability test programs, specifically the design of secure and private exchange of documents and information using internet and security standards. With a degree in nuclear engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, he has been instrumental in developing, architecting, and testing software systems for more than 30 years.
Timothy is a governing board member of Shift, a task force of industry stakeholders working through the barriers of equitable interoperability by addressing the obstacles of privatized patient health data exchange. He is actively developing testing and certification protocols for the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard in order to provide the market with comprehensive FHIR certification across the healthcare ecosystem.
He also actively collaborates with industry leaders in the areas of testing and certifying healthcare compliance of pediatrics, patient safety and usability, FHIR and public health. Finally, Timothy was the principal author of the OASIS AS4 standard, a profile of the ebXML Messaging Services v3.0 specification for secure and private exchange of data using web services.
