Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)

See the following -

The HITECH Era – A Patient-Centered Perspective

Robert M. Wachter, Michael Blum, Aaron Neinstein, and Mark Savage | Connecting Health Data | October 10, 2017

We appreciate the recent perspectives published in the New England Journal of Medicine on the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act of 2009 and the positive impact that it and resulting health IT policies have had on U.S. health care.1,2 The perspectives highlighted the remarkable increase in adoption and use of electronic health records (EHRs) over the past eight years, thanks to the HITECH Act and to ONC’s and CMS’s implementation of it with major advice and help from the multi-stakeholder HIT Policy and Standards committees...

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The New Rules of Healthcare Platforms (Part 4): APIs Enable the Platforming of Healthcare

Recent regulations have mandated the use of HL7 FHIR APIs (application programming interfaces) to share health data. The regs apply to healthcare providers, payers, and technology developers who participate in federal programs. Many incumbent healthcare organizations are viewing these mandates as a compliance burden. That’s short-sighted. We recommend a more opportunistic POV. APIs facilitate the sharing of health data across different devices and platforms. By adopting APIs, healthcare organizations can transform themselves from traditional service providers into powerful platforms that can connect patients, providers, and other stakeholders in new and innovative ways.

The Next Generation of EHRs Will Be Fundamentally Different

Robert Rowley | CIO | March 29, 2017

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) have come a long way. Over 80 percent of physicians use them in their offices, and nearly all hospitals have implemented EHRs as well. Spurred by the HITECH portion of the 2009 Recovery act, Meaningful Use has put money on the table for physicians and hospitals to adopt and use EHRs. It also defined what kinds of features an EHR must have in order to be Certified. Legacy systems took on these new requirements by adding to their offerings (sometimes referred to as “bolt-on solutions”)...

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The Postmodern EHR: What are the Enablers?

Traditional monolithic EHR architectures focus on stability and standardization at the expense of agility. Along with innovation, cloud based deployment and integration of things, agility is the main differentiator when describing the requirements of application architecture for the Postmodern EHR. Achieving agility is impossible for the vast majority of healthcare applications today as they are an inseparable mix of code for user interface, decision logic, workflows and data definitions. New architectures promote agility and reuse by turning the applications inside out and layering the four types of programming into portals, rule engines, process engines and XML data. Let’s look at some examples, layer by layer:

The Postmodern EHR: The Data Layer

This second approach entails defining a data layer, which is the most important aspect of the Postmodern EHR architecture from my previous post. Why is this the most important layer? Most healthcare organizations are beginning to realize that their data is more valuable than their applications. Data has become a key asset, since good data is key to improving outcomes, managing chronic disease and enabling population health management. And it needs to be managed for the lifetime of the patient. Which application is going to last that long? What happens to health data when we switch applications?

Three Innovative Tools You Didn’t Think The U.S. Government Could Build

John Paul Titlow | Fast Company | November 11, 2015

After the botched launch of Healthcare.gov in October 2013, it felt like the bugs, headaches, and negative headlines would never stop piling up. But the White House learned its lesson and from the ashes of that blunder, the Obama administration has begun rewiring how government approaches tech. It’s been just over a year since the launch of the U.S. Digital Service (USDS) and the government digital services agency 18F, but the lessons—and poached talent—from Silicon Valley is already infiltrating the federal government and yielding results...

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Timeline: How Apple Is Piecing Together its Secret Healthcare Plan

Bill Siwicki | Healthcare IT News | June 23, 2017

Rumors are at a fever pitch that Apple has big plans for healthcare, including putting a medical record on the iPhone, possibly acquiring its way into the EHR market. From its leap into healthcare in 2014 with its HealthKit application programming interface in September 2014 to the June 19 revelation of Apple’s work with the tiny start-up Health Gorilla, Apple has made a series of moves in healthcare that clearly indicate the company has plans for the space that will somehow manifest on its mega-popular iPhone and iPad products. Here’s a look at how Apple got to where it is today in healthcare...

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Tips and Top Presentations from Write the Docs Portland 2017

Imagine a room full of smart, funny, and quirky people who all love documentation, technology, and... food. Put all that together and you have Write the Docs (WTD) in Portland—a community conference where documentarians meet to discuss the things we love the most. WTD is a direct descendant of Read the Docs, a site that hosts documentation of open source software. Because of its origin in the open source movement, WTD is open to a variety of job titles who all care about documentation and clear communication. This year, we had QA people, librarians, software developers, and, of course, technical writers and editors, with some User eXperience (UX) people thrown in for good measure...

Top 10 FOSS Legal Stories in 2016

The year 2016 resulted in several important developments that affect the FOSS ecosystem. While they are not strictly "legal developments" they are important for the community. For one, Eben Moglen, the general counsel of the Free Software Foundation, stepped down. Eben has been a leader on FOSS legal issues since the late 1990s and has been critical to the success of the FOSS movement. The FOSS community owes him a huge debt of gratitude, and I expect that he will continue to be active in the FOSS community. The success of FOSS adoption was dramatically illustrated when Microsoft joined the Linux Foundation and summarized in the article, Open Source Won. So, Now What? in Wired magazine...

Top Open Source Projects to Watch in 2017

No one has a crystal ball to see the future of technology. Even for projects developed out in the open, code alone can't tell us whether or not a project is destined for success—but there are hints along the way. For example, perhaps it's not unreasonable to assume that the projects that will help shape our future are those projects that have first seen rapid growth and popularity among the developer community. So which new projects should an open source developer watch in 2017? Let's take a look at a few projects that emerged in 2016 to achieve rapid notoriety in the GitHub community...

True Interoperability: Public API’s Provide the Open Platform Health IT Requires

Do we finally have the spark? Interoperability is the current health IT buzzword because it’s the essential ingredient in creating a system that benefits patients, doctors and hospitals. Almost everyone in healthcare is pressing for it and is frustrated, though probably not surprised, that Meaningful Use did not get us there. Read More »

Two New Federal Reports Released That Have Major Public Health Impacts

Two new Federal reports were recently released that have a public health impact. First, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) released its 2022 Report to Congress: Update on Access, Exchange, and Use of Electronic Health Information. This report covers the current state of adoption of health information technology and access to electronic health information guided largely by the requirements of the 2016 21st Century Cures Act. The report observes that, “Although tremendous progress has been made with EHRs that capture and support the use of health information about individuals, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed gaps in health IT systems that support capturing and using population data. The challenges exposed during the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic pinpointed the importance of health IT to monitor population health regarding public health surveillance of testing, diagnosis, and vaccine distribution.”

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UK Cities Start Alliance On Sharing And Re-use

Gijs Hillenius | JoinUp | April 11, 2014

The London borough of Camden and the city of Bristol have launched the Open Systems Alliance, aiming to develop, share and re-use software solutions. The alliance was announced at the Open Source Open Standards Conference, in London last Thursday, by Camden's chief information officer, John Jackson.

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UK's Code4Health Interoperability Site Launched at EHILive 2015

Rebecca McBeth | digitalhealth.net | November 4, 2015

A Code4Health community focusing on interoperability has been launched today at the EHI Live 2015 conference in Birmingham. NHS England has unveiled a new web tool to encourage people to discuss and define a list of key application programming interfaces needed to enable new models of working across health and social care. Inderjit Singh, head of enterprise architecture at NHS England, told Digital Health News the Code4Health community “is about bringing together localities, suppliers and national organisations as a group of peers.”

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Unleashed: Open Source Tech Goes to the Dogs...and Cats...and...

I was discussing open source technology with my cat this morning and he brought up a good point: "Why don't you do an article on open source tech for animals?" You know, Donald's right. Animal open source tech deserves a spotlight. Afterall, animals appear in many open source brands, and pets, like mine at least, lend lots of support while I'm trying out new software, building gadgets, or just writing about this stuff. I did a little research, and perhaps you won't be surprised to learn there is a gaggle (the name for a group of geese) of open source projects that help us keep, love, and improve the lives of animals. Let's take a gander (also another word for a goose), shall we?