SMART Health IT was launched with a New England Journal of Medicine article proposing a universal API (application programming interface) to transform EHRs into platforms for substitutable iPhone-like apps. With federal investment, SMART on FHIR was developed as an open, free and standards-based API. Innovators use it to write an app once and have it run anywhere in the healthcare system. After successful lobbying of Congress and then the Department of Health and Human Servicesby the SMART team, the 21st Century Cures Act and 2020 Final Rule from the ONC made SMART a certification requirement. The Final Rule also specifies our SMART/HL7 FHIR Bulk Data Access API, or Flat FHIR API, which enables access to patient-level data across a patient population, supporting myriad use cases across healthcare, research, and public health ecosystems. Put simply, Flat FHIR is a standard to enable “push button” population health.
The SMART APIs are being used broadly today. The SMART on FHIR API has been built into the major EHR products, has been used by Apple to connect its health app to hundreds of healthcare systems, and is used for app launch on the Microsoft Azure product. Countless other app and platform developers, including Google, Amazon, and Verily use it as well.
Learn more about SMART, and how our team is continually innovating with projects like CDS Hooks, Flat FHIR and SMART Markers.

News
- U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced the long-awaited final rules on information-blocking and interoperability
- New Report Available: Push Button Health: Advancing SMART/HL7 Bulk Data Export/FLAT FHIR
- Push Button Population Health Data: Extending the HL7 FHIR Standard to Support Bulk Data Export
- New Report On Connected Apps in Healthcare
- 21st Century Cures Act makes APIs in EHRs the law
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