News

Direct Project: Secure e-mail in MU2

MU2 is here, and with it: secure e-mail

As Meaningful Use 2014 EHRs come online this winter, clinicians across the country gain access the host of new features included in the MU 2014 Certification Requirements. In this post, we’ll dig into one of these features: EHR-based secure e-mail capabilities that operate using the “Direct Project” specification. (If you’re new to this world: when you hear “Direct Project,” you should think “secure e-mail for healthcare.”)

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Our First Foray into Health Foo

josh-ken-healthfoo-DSC02925Josh Mandel (left) and Ken Mandl took the opportunity at this past weekend’s Health Foo (friends of O’Reilly) 2013 to exchange ideas about SMART, APIs, health data, and more. Like many of the unconference-style breakout sessions, theirs attracted a small group geared up for a more intimate and spontaneous discussion than the average healthcare/HIT conference. The talk also got a boost from the participation of thought leaders such as Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media and host of the original Foo Camps from which Health Foo evolved; and John Lumpkin, Director of the Health Care Group at Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which funded the event.

It may be held indoors at the NERD Center, but as the bare feet in this photo’s background suggest, Health Foo still manages to retain the campground flair of its predecessors—complete with drummingdancingmicrobiome sharing, and Smart Bell-ing. For more highlights, see Wen Dombrowski’s whole Storify recap.

Mandl and Mandel to Attend 2013 Health Foo Unconference

health-foo-2013

This weekend promises to be an exciting one for SMART trailblazers Ken Mandl and Josh Mandel, who have been invited to Health Foo 2013, December 6–8 at the Microsoft NERD Center in Cambridge. Health Foo (friends of O’Reilly) is an invitation-only “unconference focused on innovation in health and healthcare, sponsored by O’Reilly Media and the Pioneer Portfolio of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation” (RWJF).

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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.
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Healthcare IT Interoperability”

A Quick Payoff for SMART-Enabling an EHR System

Over the summer, a European EHR vendor took quick advantage of SMART-enabling its EHR system, adding in the SMART API to enable it to offer both the SMART Pediatric Growth Chart and SMART Blood Pressure Centiles apps. Marand, provider of the Think!Med Clinical™ EHR system, adopted SMART, incorporating it into their openEHR-based system along with these initial apps, which were promptly made available for users at the 200-bed Children’s Hospital of Ljubljana University Medical Centre in Slovenia.
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Kohane Commentary on Grande et al Findings

JAMA Int Med: Secondary Use of Health Information: Are We Asking the Right Question?A report on “Public Preferences About Secondary Uses of Electronic Health Information” has just been published by a group of researchers led by Dr. David Grande at UPenn’s medical school. The publishing journal, JAMA Internal Medicine, also invited SMART Co-Director Zak Kohane to comment. His remarks appear in Secondary Use of Health Information: Are We Asking the Right Question? and may be read in their entirety by enlarging the image on the right. (A subscription is required to access the articles’ full texts.)

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SMART Medication Adherence App in i-JMR

Just published in interactive Journal of Medical Research: “Scalable Decision Support at the Point of Care: A Substitutable Electronic Health Record App for Monitoring Medication Adherence”

Democratizing Data: Two New SMART iOS Apps

The Harvard Medical School (HMS) news office reports on DB EMR and Genomics Advisor, soon to be released on iTunes.

SMART’s Ramoni on Panel at Fjord Kitchen NYC (Video)

While collaborating with Fjord on our award-winning growth chart app, SMART Executive Director Rachel Ramoni spoke at a Fjord Kitchen Event, which they host to “dish out inspiration” on digital technology from creative minds across industries. Looking back on the experience, Rachel said, Continue reading “SMART’s Ramoni on Panel at Fjord Kitchen NYC (Video)”

SMART Platform Integral to Kohane’s TEDMED Pitch for Putting Our Health Data to Work

Visit TEDMED for more on these and other talks.

How can every clinical visit be used to advance medical science? (13:05)

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