WASHINGTON – The Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services will hold its first developers conference next week for Blue Button 2.0, a developer-friendly, standards based application programming interface that will allow a majority of Medicare beneficiaries to connect their claims data to third-party applications, services and research programs.
More than 600 developers have signed up to experiment with the API since it was launched, according to Seema Verma, CMS Administrator, in published remarks she made recently at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology Interoperability Forum.
The Blue Button 2.0 Developer Conference will bring together app developers to learn, build software and share insights on how Medicare claims data can be leveraged to improve health outcomes. The conference will also help further advance the work of the MyHealthEData, a government-wide initiative led by the White House Office of American Innovation to give people control of their medical data to enable them to make better choices for value driven health care.
The MyHealthEData initiative also seeks to break down the barriers that prevent patients from having electronic access and true control of their own health records from the device or application of their choice.
As part of MyHealthEData, CMS has securely released four years of Medicare Part A, B and D data for 53 million Medicare beneficiaries. The data contains a variety of information about a beneficiary’s health, including type of Medicare coverage, drug prescriptions, primary care treatment and cost.
“With the release of this data, CMS wants to work with developers to create new applications that help make this data more helpful and meaningful for patients,” said Verma. “This conference is the perfect venue for developers to network with each other and with leaders in the federal government to collaborate on ways to engage Medicare beneficiaries to make informed health care decisions.”