The Stage is set for
Healthcare Information System’s to evolve and embrace the API Led development
approach to develop clinical
applications to consume across the enterprise.
The primary drivers for this change in the industry are:
1)
Patient Centric Healthcare
2)
CMS mandated Meaningful use of EHR’s
3)
Better Decision Making
4)
Transaction Modernization Solutions
The Healthcare Information Systems of today are not ready to
realize these “shifts” in priorities. A new architectural approach is needed to
move the Healthcare away from its heavy reliance on HL7 and custom integrations
to embracing the API driven Architecture model. This is where FHIR API’s have
introduce a new standard to exchange Electronic Health Records (EHR’s). FHIR
use of API’s allows implementers to easy integrate, request and transfer data
between various Healthcare systems.
The basic building blocks of FHIR API’s are its base
resource pools and that are categorized and interact with each other to build a
complete picture. This defines the way
information can be exchanged between different healthcare systems.
The ultimate goal with FHIR API’s is easy exchange of
information not only within the organization but also make FHIR accessible to 3rd
party applications that provide more engaging patient experiences.
These applications are called “SMART”(Substitutable medical
apps and resuable technology) apps which are applications that can run on FHIR
API’s and consume information from the Hospital Information Systems to deliver
Patients-Centric-Healthcare.
Organizations can use
API management Platforms to leverage FHIR API’s securely:
TIBCO’s API management platform Mashery has the ability to
enable healthcare provides to host their FHIR API’s. Mashery’s authentication
support for OAuth2 and reduced coding requirements enable Healthcare providers
to accelerate their implementation of FHIR API’s. This implementation provides
true flexibility to Healthcare providers and allows them to accelerate
implementations of modern clinical applications.
Mashery allows Healthcare providers to expose their
Electronic Health Records (EHR’s) seamlessly with 3rd party
applications and manage your partner applications. Effectively, the healthcare
provider can provide access to an App Store which has “Smart” Applications that
a customer can use to interact with the Hospital information system to put the
Patient at the centre of the Healthcare experience. All of this can be done
without comprising security using Mashery’s support for OAuth2.
Roadmap to reaching
complete FHIR API compliance:
HL7 prominence in healthcare information systems makes it
difficult for providers to shift stable and operational systems to a new
architecture overnight. Hospital information systems of today have many
critical systems and processes which are interdependent and are already running
on HL7 integration’s. These interfaces and systems are mission critical and can
cause a lot of headaches which considering the switch to FHIR API’s. This is
where TIBCO’s best in class integration solutions can solve a lot of these
issues by packing existing integrations as Rest interfaces without any
disruption to critical processes. TIBCO Business Works comes with a plug in for
HL7 messaging which allows organizations to deploy cloud native healthcare
integrations.
This allows for a seamless staggered implementation of FHIR
across the Healthcare information system. The implementation in general goes
through 5 different levels from basic framework to clinical reasoning which can
be easily achieved using TIBCO’s enterprise solutions.
