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”