We recently posted about Ken Mandl’s participation in a panel at the OSEHRA 1st Annual Open Source EHR Summit and Workshop. Audio and slides are now available to those with OSEHRA user accounts; scroll to Day One, 3pm, “Open Source Best Practice and Business Models.”
Now we’d like to back up and talk briefly about OSEHRA itself, and share links that highlight its relationship to SMART.
As Health 2.0 News recently reminded the community, the SMART-Indivo App Challenge is underway.
On August 7, a webinar provided an in-depth review of the challenge and allowed interested participants to ask questions to the challenge hosts. Slides from the webinar are available on the challenge website and hosted on Slideshare.
Advance registration for the challenge is recommended. Final submissions are due on September 28, 2012. The first place team will be awarded with $10,000. The second and third place teams will receive awards of $2,000 and $1,000, respectively.
In my 7/24/2012 post, I observed that exchanging uncoded lab results is the state of the art.
Why worry? SMART is pushing to enable third-party apps on disparate health IT systems, and codes are the glue holding meaning together. Without coded data, apps can’t tell a Hemoglobin A1c measurement from a monocyte percentage!
In the USA we have substantial infrastructure to promote the flow of coded data. So where do things break down?
At last week’s Redwood MedNet HIE Conference, I had the chance to attend an “Interoperability Exhibition” demonstrating the data exchange capabilities of several EHRs. Two themes emerged around clinical summary export. I’ll focus on CCDs (Continuity of Care Documents), but the themes apply to CCRs (Continuity of Care Records) as well:
Today’s post focuses on #1. In a future post, I’ll investigate the interplay between certification and meaningful use to understand where LOINC codes disappear to.
Meaningful Use mandates CCD export from EMRs. Here are some reasons why we’re still querying database tables and calling vendor-specific web services to extract the data we need to fuel apps.
At yesterday’s Health 2.0 conference, Farzad Mostashari asked why SMART isn’t using CCD export (as specified by Meaningful Use) to extract data from EMR systems. This is a great question, in part because it separates out two important aspects of SMART:
—and focuses on #1. (I don’t think many would argue that CCD is fit for #2. And to be clear: for developers building a SMART app, the details of #1 are almost irrelevant. SMART app developers get one clear-cut API to work with, and consistent SMART data elements)
Continue reading ““CCD export” doesn’t solve interoperability”
The SMART team has published a new preview release (v0.3) of the SMART platform. With this release, we are rolling out a number of API changes incorporating feedback from the $5K challenge, simplifying some of the infrastructure, and adding some new data types.
The SMART team has published a new preview release (v0.3) of the SMART platform. With this release, we are rolling out a number of API changes incorporating feedback from the $5K challenge, simplifying some of the infrastructure, and adding some new data types. We have already updated the public sandbox with the v0.3 code, as well as the developer’s guide.
One of the main changes with v0.3 is that SMART apps are no longer required to have a bootstrap.html. The apps are now launched directly from index.html with the oauth tokens passed as a get parameter. For a more complete run-down on updating your SMART application code, please see: http://wiki.chip.org/smart-project/index.php/Developers_Documentation:_Changelog
We are looking forward to hearing your thoughts and suggestions about the new release.
OpenMRS has been funded for its fifth consecutive Google Summer of Code!
Among a host of exciting projects, SMART is working with OpenMRS to propose:
A couple of months ago, The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology issued its Report to the President on Realizing the Full Potential of Health Information Technology to Improve Healthcare for Americans. We want to tell you how SMART fits in.
Continue reading “How SMART addresses the PCAST Report on Health IT”
SMART apps receive patient data in RDF graphs that contain a set of assertions or “triples” such as:
{ <John Smith> <is-taking> <lipitor> }
We think RDF is a flexible and elegant way to represent all kinds of data. But we recognize that RDF and SPARQL (a query language for RDF graphs) aren’t regular items in every Web developer’s toolkit. To help SMART developers get up to speed, we’ve written a pair of tutorials on our wiki:
Please have a look, try out the live query tools, and let us know what you think!