Reflecting on his recent experience at the first-of-its-kind Health:Refactored conference, SMART lead architect Josh Mandel (left) said:
Health:Refactored convened a vibrant mix of doers in Health technology, with a clear focus on designing, building, and iterating on better health tools. It was an exciting chance to meet and scheme with the broader developer community about SMART, BlueButton+, and the burgeoning marketplace of health APIs. A key theme for me: the critical importance of breaking down silo walls so patients (consumers!) and clinicians can—to echo Zak Kohane’s TEDMED mantra—make their data count for them.
The conference, held May 13–14 in Mountain View, California, was hosted by Health 2.0. (See their Facebook page for the whole photo gallery. Shown above with Josh is Gordon Raup, CTO at Datuit, LLC.)
Two industry leaders who had spoken at the conference then mentioned SMART in the days immediately following:
- HealthVault’s Sean Nolan, whose Health:Refactored keynote was on scaling HIT projects beyond their test phases, pointed to SMART as one of the platforms that “make it easy for savvy developers to concentrate on their innovations, not the mess underneath them — and puts them in a position to escape the black hole of the forever pilot.” Read more in his May 15 post, Your Turn! Enter the $10K Windows 8 & HealthVault Challenge.
- A May 16 piece by David Chao, senior product manager at MuleSoft, listed the SMART approach as an example of the “loose coupling of ‘best-of-breed’ applications [that] has proven to be a far more effective model [than] sharing data through a single, inflexible system.” He had spoken on a panel during the first of a two-part series called Dreaming of Data: Big, Open, & Interoperable. In addition to reading David’s Venture Beat guest post, How Health Organizations Can Tackle Integration Challenges, you can also listen to his pre-conference interview with Matthew Holt, in which he asserted that APIs in Health Care Are Just the First Step.