FHIR is laying a framework for digital disruption to occur. A big part of FHIR’s popularity is that it’s vendor-neutral and free to use, which allows innovators to do things that couldn’t easily be done before. […] The SMART on FHIR app platform and app gallery are great examples. Think of SMART on FHIR like the app store on a smartphone. Some of the apps are designed for physicians to use, such as the Growth Chart app developed by Boston’s Children’s Hospital. The app plots a child’s height and weight against growth charts published by the World Health Organization and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) so that physicians can track a child’s growth over time and communicate this to the child’s caregivers.
Other apps in the SMART on FHIR gallery are patient-facing, such as the ClinDat application, which makes it easier for rheumatoid arthritis patients to document which joints are normal, tender, or swollen. These data are captured electronically and sent back to the medical record in real-time to support the clinical care patients receive. The beauty of SMART on FHIR is the apps are vendor neutral and can be ‘plugged-in’ to EHRs and other tools used on multiple devices (particularly mobile devices) that are already integrated into clinicians’ workflows.
Category: Blog
RFP Language for Buying SMART-Compatible HIT
SMART Platform (www.smarthealthit.org) is a project that lays the groundwork for a more flexible approach to sourcing health information technology tools. Like Apple and Android’s app stores, SMART creates the means for developers to create and for health systems and providers to easily deploy third-party applications in tandem with their existing electronic health record, data warehouse, or health information exchange platforms.
To deploy SMART-enabled applications, health systems must ensure that their existing health information technology infrastructure supports the SMART on FHIR API. The SMART on FHIR starter set detailed below lists the minimum requirements for supporting the API and SMART-enabled applications. You may wish to augment this list of minimum requirements with suggestions from the Add-On Functionality listed depending on the types of applications your organization wishes to deploy.
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C-CDAs — What are they good for?
David Kreda, SMART Translation Advisor
Joshua Mandel, SMART Lead Architect
Some readers of our JAMIA paper “Are Meaningful Use Stage 2 certified EHRs ready for Interoperability?” have wondered if we were insinuating that C-CDAs are all but useless because of their heterogeneity and other defects.
We did not say that.
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Certification/MU tweaks to support patient subscriptions
This is a quick description of the minimum requirements to turn patient-mediated “transmit” into a usable system for feeding clinical data to a patient’s preferred endpoints. In my blog post last month, I described a small, incremental “trust tweak” asking ONC and CMS to converge on the Blue Button Patient Trust Bundle, so that any patient anywhere has the capability to send data to any app in the bundle.
This proposal builds on that initial tweak. I should be clear that the ideas here aren’t novel: they borrow very clearly from the Blue Button+ Direct implementation guide (which is not part of certification or MU — but aspects of it ought to be).
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Improving patient access: small steps and patch-ups
In a blog post earlier this month, I advocated for ONC and CMS to adopt a grand scheme to improve patient data access through the SMART on FHIR API. Here, I’ll advocate for a very small scheme that ignores some of the big issues, but aims to patch up one of the most broken aspects of today’s system.
The problem: patient-facing “transmit” is broken
Not to mince words: ONC’s certification program and CMS’s attestation program are out of sync on patient access. As a result, patient portals don’t offer reliable “transmit” capabilities.
2014-certified EHR systems must demonstrate support for portal-based Direct message transmission, but providers don’t need to make these capabilities available for patients in real life. Today, two loopholes prevent patient access:
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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.
Disturbing state of EHR Security Vulnerability Reporting
Last week I reported on a set of security vulnerabilities that affected multiple EHR vendors and other Health IT systems.
I initially discovered the vulnerability in a single Web-based EHR system and successfully reported it directly to that vendor.
But my subsequent journey into the world of EHR vulnerability reporting left me deeply concerned that our EHR vendors do not have mature reporting systems in place. Patient health data are among the most personal, sensitive aspects of our online presence. They offer an increasingly high-value target for identity theft, blackmail, and ransom. It’s time for EHR vendors to take a page from the playbook of consumer tech companies by instituting the same kinds of security vulnerability reporting programs that are ubiquitous on the consumer Web.
HL7 and EHR Vendors must address security reporting
I’ll lead with the key message here, and provide supporting evidence below: HL7 and EHR vendors need to institute security vulnerability reporting programs!
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Case study: security vulnerabilities in C-CDA display
For background, see my previous blog post describing the details of three security vulnerabilities in C-CDA Display using HL7’s CDA.xsl.
Last month I discovered a set of security vulnerabilities in a well-known commercial EHR product that I’ll pseudonymously call “Friendly Web EHR”. Here’s the story…
The story: discovery and reporting
I was poking around my account in Friendly Web EHR, examining MU2 features like C-CDA display and Direct messaging. I used the “document upload” feature to upload some C-CDAs from SMART’s Sample C-CDA Repository. At the time, I was curious about the user experience. (Specifically, I was bemoaning how clunky the standard XSLT-based C-CDA rendering looks.) I wondered how the C-CDA viewer was embedded into the EHR. Was it by direct DOM insertion? Inline frames? I opened up Chrome Developer Tools to take a look.
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Security vulnerabilities in C-CDA Display using CDA.xsl
TL;DR: If you’re using XSLT stylesheets to render C-CDAs in your EHR, make sure you understand the security implications. Otherwise you could be vulnerable to a data breach.
This blog post describes security issues that have affected well-known 2014 Certified EHRs.. Please note that I’ve already shared this information privately with the Web-based EHR vendors I could identify, and I’ve waited until they were able to investigate the issues and (if needed) repair their systems.
Last month I observed a set of security vulnerabilities in XSLT “stylesheets” used to display externally-supplied C-CDA documents in many EHRs. To be specific: the CDA.xsl stylesheet provided by HL7 (which has been adopted by many EHR vendors) can leave EHRs vulnerable to attacks by maliciously-composed documents.
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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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