Tag: smart-on-fhir

SMART Advice on JASON (and PCAST)

As architect for SMART Platforms and community lead for the Blue Button REST API, I’m defining open APIs for health data that spark innovation in patient care, consumer empowerment, clinical research. So I was very pleased last month at an invitation to join a newly-formed Federal Advisory Committee called the JASON Task Force, helping ONC respond to the JASON Report (“A Robust Health Data Infrastructure”).

We’re charged with making recommendations to ONC about how to proceed toward building practical, broad-reaching interoperability in Meaningful Use Stage 3 and beyond. Our committee is still meeting and forming recommendations throughout the summer and into the fall, but I wanted to share my initial thoughts on the scope of the problem; where we are today; and how we can make real progress as we move forward.

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How does FHIR express uncertainty and negation?

Last week I received an e-mail asking how FHIR expresses Uncertainty and Negation. It was a general inquiry, but also asked how FHIR might express a specific clinical statement like “Intolerant to opiods, no known other medication ADEs, and no known environmental/food allergens”.

Here’s what I said…
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SMART, FHIR, and a Plan for Achieving
Healthcare IT Interoperability

Since 2010, the SMART team has been privileged to work on an exciting frontier of health data liberation, exposing structured patient-level data through an open API. We’ve striven for simplicity, with a constrained set of well-described data models, fixed vocabularies, a clean REST API, and Web-based UI integration. And we’ve endeavored to use existing standards where they fit the bill: that is, when existing standards were openly available and met our own subjective criterion of developer-friendliness.

When we launched our first preview of the SMART API back in 2010, there was no structured data content standard that fit the bill, so we rolled our own. We started with simple models for Patient, Medication, and Fulfillment, and over time we’ve expanded the collection to encompass over a dozen top-level clinical statements. Building and maintaining these data models was never our core goal, but until recently, there hasn’t been a suitable alternative on the horizon.
Continue reading “SMART, FHIR, and a Plan for Achieving
Healthcare IT Interoperability”