Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)

See the following -

How Closed EHR Records Cause Paralysis

Take a step back from the challenges that surround health information technology (HIT) interoperability and you will recognize that market forces and a desperately fragmented health care system make hospitals and vendors act the way we do...The predominant proprietary HIT vendors know about the interoperability gap yet engage in prolonged foot-dragging on even basic data interfacing. Read More »

How Does FHIR Fit into Recent Interoperability Initiatives?

Sara Heath | Health IT Interoperability | May 18, 2016

Over the past few months, APIs have been the talk of the healthcare industry, pushing HL7's FHIR into the spotlight for interoperability. Plenty of talk supports the position that application programming interfaces (APIs) will enhance health data interoperability, particularly a leading API standard known as FHIR. Health Level 7’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource (FHIR) is a data standard that helps different health applications work on the different interfaces that exist in the industry (such as an Epic Systems or a Cerner interface)...

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How Hospital Administrators Are Obstructing Medical Record Exchange APIs

Bruce Fryer | Programmable Web | September 12, 2017

Medical record exchange is a major topic in healthcare, needed to improve healthcare outcomes (and reduce costs) for multiple patients receiving care at multiple sites.  The discussion in the industry primarily focuses on technical challenges. In reality, many of the technical challenges have been addressed. A big factor in the inability of medical record exchange is the hospitals themselves. They block information and APIs. I’ve had two experiences with getting medical records...

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How Hospital Administrators Are Obstructing Medical Record Exchange APIs

Bruce Fryer | Programmable Web | September 12, 2017

Medical record exchange is a major topic in healthcare, needed to improve healthcare outcomes (and reduce costs) for multiple patients receiving care at multiple sites.  The discussion in the industry primarily focuses on technical challenges. In reality, many of the technical challenges have been addressed. A big factor in the inability of medical record exchange is the hospitals themselves. They block information and APIs. I’ve had two experiences with getting medical records...

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How Open Government Is Helping With Hurricane Relief in Puerto Rico

Just weeks after Hurricane Harvey hit Texas, two more "unprecedented" hurricanes made their way to the southeastern United States. Although changes in Hurricane Irma's path spared Florida from the bulk of the damage, both Irma and Maria directly hit Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Hurricane Maria was particularly devastating for the more than 3.5 million American citizens living in these U.S. Caribbean territories. The CEO of Puerto Rico's sole electric company indicated that the grid had been "basically destroyed." Without electricity, communications were severely limited. In the aftermath of a natural disaster, embracing open government principles—such as open data, collaboration between citizens and government, and transparency—can save lives.

How SMART on FHIR Grew Vendor Support for Interoperable HIT Apps

Sara Heath | EHR Intelligence | February 18, 2017

Kenneth Mandl, MD, and Isaac Kohane, MD, PhD, both big players in creating SMART on FHIR, a major interoperability project, have recently recounted key details to the project and its successes in a paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. This paper first explained the project, stating that the Substitutable Medical Applications and Reusable Technologies (SMART) project aimed to create a platform on which developers could make healthcare applications that could run interoperably across different health IT systems...

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How Time-series Databases Help Make Sense of Sensors

Infrastructure environments' needs and demands change every year and systems become more complex and involved. But all this growth is meaningless if we don't understand the infrastructure and what's happening in our environment. This is where monitoring tools and software come in; they give operators and administrators the ability to see problems in their environments and fix them in real time. But what if we want to predict problems before they happen? Collecting metrics and data about our environment gives us a window into how our infrastructure is performing and lets us make predictions based on data. When we know and understand what's happening, we can prevent problems, rather than just fixing them...

How to Prepare for the API Requirements of the Cures Act

As of April 5, 2021, the U.S. ONC Cures Act Final Rule Compliance Timeframe is in effect. Healthcare providers, Health IT developers, Health Information Exchanges (HIEs), and Health Information Networks (HINs) will have until October 6, 2022, to provide patients with access to all their Electronic Health Information (EHI). There are several requirements that providers, developers, and exchanges must adhere to. Among them are Conditions and Maintenance of Certification requirements for Information Blocking, Communications, and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). To help you navigate this compliance timeframe, we've asked our J P System's HL7 FHIR® expert, Jay Lyle, what does one need to know about APIs and data standards. Jay has been co-chair of the HL7 Patient Care Work Group for 8 years and is an expert in HL7 data standards development and APIs.

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How to Use Libraries.io Data from Millions of Open Source Projects

What if we applied the techniques Google applied to index the internet back in 1998 to the world of open source software? That's exactly the thought Andrew Nesbitt had in 2014 which lead to the creation of Libraries.io, an open source project for indexing other open source projects. This month Libraries.io released metadata on over 25 million open source projects. You can download it right now from Zenodo, but what can you do with it? To understand what is contained within this dataset, I'll take a quick look at how it's collected. Everything in Libraries.io begins with package managers. We index project metadata from 33 package managers, filling in gaps from their source repositories where we can. We parse project manifests—a gemfile, package.json, or similar—that includes code from other projects and stores the links between them...

How to Write Documentation That's Actually Useful

Steven Vaughan-Nichols | Enterprise.Nxt | July 10, 2017

Programmers love to write code, but they hate to write documentation. Developers always want to read documentation when they inherit a project, but writing it themselves? Feh! How common is this? A recent GitHub survey found that "incomplete or outdated documentation is a pervasive problem," according to 93 percent of respondents. Yet 60 percent of contributors to the open source code repository say they rarely or never contribute to documentation. Their reasoning, for both the open source projects and their own applications? A common attitude that "documentation is for 'lusers' who don't write good code!"...

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Internet Of Thingbots: The New Security Worry

Jeff Bertolucci | Information Week | April 30, 2014

Phishing and spam attacks involving Internet of Things devices are coming -- and app developers and device makers must be ready, says a CA Technologies exec.

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Is the Technology Gap the Reason Why Medical Errors are the 3rd Leading Cause of Death in the US?

Hardly a day goes by without some new revelation of an information technology (IT) mess in the United States that seems like an endless round of the old radio show joke contest, “Can You Top This” except that increasingly the joke is on us. From nuclear weapons updated with floppy disks, to critical financial systems in the Department of the Treasury that run on assembler language code (a computer language initially used in the 1950s and typically tied to the hardware for which it was developed), to medical systems that cannot exchange patient records leading to a large number of needless deaths from medical errors.

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JASON Task Force To ONC: Consider Delaying MU Stage 3 Incentives

Marla Durben Hirsch | Fierce EMR | October 14, 2014

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT should narrow Meaningful Use Stage 3 to focus on interoperability and "assertively monitor" the transition to public APIs but implement only "non-regulatory steps" to catalyze the transition, according to ONC's JASON task force...

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Key Organizations Come Together in Support of Patient-Centered and Interoperable Health IT

Press Release | National Association for Trusted Exchange | May 3, 2016

The National Association for Trusted Exchange (NATE) and CommonWell Health Alliance® today announced that each would become a member of the other’s organization. They have agreed to establish a mutual synergistic and complementary relationship with the goal of enhancing cross-vendor interoperability to better assure provider and patient access to health data regardless of where care occurs. NATE is a not-for-profit membership association focused on enabling trusted exchange among organizations and individuals with differing regulatory environments and exchange preferences...

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Kitware Unleashes Brand-New Rendering Backend in ParaView 5.0

Press Release | Kitware | January 14, 2016

On behalf of the ParaView community, Kitware announces the release of ParaView 5.0. The release follows closely on the heels of ParaView 4.4, building on its features while presenting a rewrite of ParaView’s rendering backend to leverage newer OpenGL features. This major milestone in ParaView’s life cycle ensures that the open-source, multi-platform data analysis and visualization application gets the most out of modern graphics cards and rendering systems for large data sets...

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