Healthcare Information System’s need to Evolve and Embrace FHIR API's

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 3^rd 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 3^rd 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.