Category: Announcements

A key topic at this year’s Indivo Users’ Conference was the release of version 2.0, which provides “deep integration with the SMART data models and API.” In other words, the Indivo personal health platform is now a full-fledged SMART container. Visit the Indivo site to learn more about

• What SMART adds to Indivo
• What Indivo adds to SMART
• The SMART-Indivo Portal

Conference presentations included a keynote from Farzad Mostashari, National Coordinator of HIT, ONC; Indivo–SMART integration by Daniel Haas, Indivo Lead Architect; the SMART API by Nikolai Schwertner, Senior SMART Developer; Indivo–i2b2 integration by Shawn Murphy, Partners HealthCare; Indivo iOS framework by Pascal Pfiffner, Children’s Hospital Informatics Program; and lightning talks from the MIT Media Lab, Novartis, Childhood Arthritis & Rheumatology Research Alliance, and MuleSoft.

Ken Mandl also premiered the new Indivo Film, an animated “story of what’s to come” in Health IT, voiced by Amy Madigan.

The UK’s National Health Service held its first NHS Hack Day on May 26-27, a weekend marathon of disruptive innovation, largely inspired by the open source culture and hackathon trend in the US. One of the 14 teams to submit an app at the end of the session used SMART, implementing a portion of the SMART API to expose the HES dataset. The result was a modest data grid and radar chart for patient problems (image below). But the strategic ramifications, said co-developer Rob Tweed, are far-reaching. “The technology clearly works and is applicable to use in the UK just as in the US. This is a set of wheels that the NHS can avoid re-inventing.”

The demo app has also added momentum to a specific goal that Tweed and colleague George Lilly are helping us realize: to SMART-enable VistA, the open source EHR created at the US Dept. of Veterans Affairs. The two will be presenting on just that topic next Tuesday, June 5, at the 25th VistA Community Meeting in Fairfax, VA. Their talk will follow shortly after Lead Architect Josh Mandel presents an overview of the SMART architecture.

The SMART team is happy to announce that it’s working with Mirth Corporation, a global leader in commercial open source healthcare information technology, to SMART-enable the HealthBridge and Redwood MedNet Health Information Exchanges. The SMART API and the growing selection of SMART applications offer a great way to enhance the utility of the health data shared within these two networks. Stay tuned to smarthealthit.org for updates on this and other exciting projects.

About Mirth Corporation

Mirth is a global leader in commercial open source products and services powering healthcare interoperability and community-based care management. Mirth delivers information technology consulting, and hosts high availability secure applications. Mirth solutions are used daily by thousands of health professionals and institutions worldwide to streamline care management processes and to securely exchange health information across enterprises, communities and broad geographies. For more information visit http://www.mirthcorp.com.

SMART and OpenMRS are proud to announce the initial release of a SMART module for OpenMRS.

This module expands the reach of the SMART API by allowing apps to run (unmodified!) on the open-source Open Medical Record System. It also provides a lightweight interface for developers who want to extend the functionality of OpenMRS.

Work on this module began as a Google Summer of Code project and continued through the fall with support from the OpenMRS team.

The initial release provides developers access to the SMART Connect API in OpenMRS. SMART REST API support is planned for a future release.

“Polyglot Systems has developed a number of products that can improve health outcomes and decrease costs.  Despite these benefits, achieving widespread adoption is extremely difficult if the products cause any interruption in provider workflow.  This makes EMR/EHR integration essential.  The SMART Platform offers Polyglot a way to quickly and affordably integrate its products across multiple EMR and EHR systems.  By doing so, the SMART Platform lets Polyglot and other innovators deploy their solutions much more broadly and quickly than would otherwise be the case.”

On June 16th and 17th, 2011, our judges convened and deliberated to score the apps for the SMART Apps for Health $5,000 Challenge, which opened back in March.

Meducation is the winner.

The Meducation SMART app, created by Polyglot Systems, Inc. – a health IT company with a focus on improving care and access for underserved patient populations – provides multilingual, patient-friendly instructions for medications listed in a physician’s electronic medical record or the personally controlled health record of a patient. The app uses the SMART programming interface to obtain the medication list and then links out to a drug information database, which facilitates the generation of simplified medication instructions for patients, available in a dozen languages.

In addition to the winner, several selected as honorable mentions:

• Clinical Research facilitates interoperability between an EMR system and a clinical electronic data capture system
• MyNote provides an intuitive, interactive timeline of patient history with disease-specific schemes, and allows patients to annotate the timeline
• Priority Contact enhances the work process of a clinician by managing contact with patients after they have left the clinic and new information relevant to their treatment plan has been obtained
• DxSocial matches patients with doctors based on their experience treating patients similar to them matches patients with doctors based on their experience treating patients similar to them
• Medications Risk Maps for SMArt helps identify and compare medication side effects and risk of adverse events across drugs
• rxInfo is a suite of SMART apps to help identify patients for clinical trials, provide drug interaction information, FDA Label information about marketed drugs, and a listing of nearby federally funded health centers

You can view all the submitted apps at http://smartapps.challenge.gov/submissions.

Current-stage EMRs decide if, when, and how you will view the data trapped in their systems. The SMART Platform Apps Challenge was designed to demonstrate what can happen when electronic health information becomes liberated and can be readily consumed by computer applications. iPhone and Android app developers have been very successful because the address book and GPS data in those platforms is clearly and consistently presented by the platform. Our goal is to present health data in as useful and consistent format. Based on the submissions we received, we think we have demonstrated that this approach can be successful.

That we had so many excellent applicants reflects the hunger and need felt in the community to deliver innovative healthcare applications directly to doctors and patients without having to learn the details of a large, monolithic EMR

Congratulations to our winner and honorable mentions!

The SMART $5K Apps Challenge is now closed to entries, but you can still learn about it at our Challenge.gov page!

Our panel of judges are currently reviewing the entries, and winners will be announced on June 22nd.

SMART wishes to thank our eminent panel of judges:

Susannah Fox
Director of Health Research at the Pew Internet & American Life Project

Regina Herzlinger
Nancy R. McPherson Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School

David Kibbe
Director, Center for Health Information Technology, American Academy of Family Physicians
The Kibbe Group LLC

Ben Shneiderman
Professor of Computer Science at the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory at the University of Maryland, College Park

Doug Solomon
Chief Technology Officer at IDEO

Edward Tufte
Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Statistics, and Computer Science at Yale University

Jim Walker
Chief Health Information Officer, Geisinger Health Systems

A concise overview of the project is available here in video form.