U.K. Collaborators Build SMART Proof of Concept at NHS Hack Day

The UK’s National Health Service held its first NHS Hack Day on May 26-27, a weekend marathon of disruptive innovation, largely inspired by the open source culture and hackathon trend in the US. One of the 14 teams to submit an app at the end of the session used SMART, implementing a portion of the SMART API to expose the HES dataset. The result was a modest data grid and radar chart for patient problems (image below). But the strategic ramifications, said co-developer Rob Tweed, are far-reaching. “The technology clearly works and is applicable to use in the UK just as in the US. This is a set of wheels that the NHS can avoid re-inventing.”

The app has also added momentum to a specific goal that Tweed and colleague George Lilly are helping us realize: to SMART-enable VistA , the open source EHR created at the US Dept. of Veterans Affairs. The two will be presenting on just that topic next Tuesday, June 5, at the 25th VistA Community Meeting in Fairfax, VA. Their talk will follow shortly after Lead Architect Josh Mandel presents an overview of the SMART architecture.