Category: News Etc

SMART-Indivo App Challenge

The SMART-Indivo App Challenge is now Live!

This contest is a call to developers to build an Indivo app that provides value to patients using data delivered through the SMART API and Indivo-specific extensions. The top 3 submissions will win cash prizes, with the top one taking home $10,000 and the opportunity to exhibit at an upcoming conference.

We look forward to seeing what innovative ideas are enabled by Indivo and its integration with SMART, so check out the contest details, read the Indivo Documentation, visit the Indivo Sandbox, and start hacking!

Health2.0 Developer Challenge logo

July 11: Remote Seats Left for HANDI’s SMART/OpenEHR Meeting

HANDI–the Healthcare App Network for Development and Innovation–will host a meeting on the SMART platform and OpenEHR on Wednesday, July 11.

This meeting will include expert presentation of the two technologies and an opportunity to explore their further use in the UK and/or possible collaboration at a global level.

  • The SMART Platform – Rob Tweed will lead on this with input from US colleagues who will hopefully join virtually – Rob is a UK based developer who has worked with SMART on the creation of a SMART wrapper for VistA open source EHR
  • OpenEHR – Dr Ian McNicoll and Seref Arikan will lead on this. Ian is a former GP and experienced informatician who has worked on OpenEHR in the UK, Europe and Australia. Seref is also an experienced health informatician and is currently working on OpenEHR at UCL London (one of the founders of the OpenEHR Foundation).

Registration is required, and remote seats are still available.

O’Reilly Media Editor Calls Indivo-SMART-i2b2 Trio a Powerful Combination

Among the attendees of last week’s Indivo conference was Andy Oram, who writes regularly about the societal effects of Internet policy and technical innovation. His piece in the O’Reilly Radar summarizes Monday’s talks and explains the significance of the “historical” SMART-enabled Indivo v2 release. It also mentions Tuesday’s hackathon, shown below, where developers tried their hands at app creation and integration.

Indivo hackathon 2012
Indivo hackathon 2012

Clinician, researcher, and patients working together: progress aired at Indivo conference

O’Reilly Radar, June 21, 2012 — Andy Oram
While thousands of health care professionals were flocking to the BIO International Convention this week, I spent Monday in a small library at the Harvard Medical School listening to a discussion of the Indivo patient health record and related open source projects with about 80 intensely committed followers. Lead Indivo architect Daniel Haas, whom I interviewed a year ago, succeeded in getting the historical 2.0 release of Indivo out on the day of the conference. This article explains the significance of the release in the health care field and the promise of the work being done at Harvard Medical School and its collaborators…
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SMART-Enabled Indivo X Release a Highlight of Users’ Conference

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.

EHR Innovation Gap Threatens Healthcare Progress

InformationWeek Healthcare , June 19, 2012 — Nicole Lewis
Electronic health records suffer from a lack of innovation that thwarts physicians’ attempts to advance healthcare processes and workflow. Unlike word-processing programs, search engines, social networks, and mobile phones and apps, EHRs are stuck in the pre-Internet world where EHR vendors not only control the data, but also resist improvements to functionality while reaping huge financial rewards, concludes a…
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HIT Expert Contends That EHR Vendors are Curbing Innovation (Part 2)

Healthcare Informatics Magazine, June 18, 2012 — Gabriel Perna
A recent piece by two Boston Children’s Hospital informatics researchers in the New England Journal of Medicine, Kenneth Mandl, M.D. and Isaac Kohane, M.D., made the argument that EHR vendors are holding back innovation in the health IT industry. This controversial opinion comes from the duo’s belief that many vendors have failed to adopt basic Internet-era sources for their systems such as private cloud-based storage and secure communication protocols, as well as modern consumer technologies such as word processing and search engines…
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HIT Expert Contends That EHR Vendors are Curbing Innovation (Part 1)

Healthcare Informatics Magazine, June 15, 2012 — Gabriel Perna
In a recent piece for the New England Journal of Medicine, two Boston Children’s Hospital informatics researchers, Kenneth Mandl, M.D. and Isaac Kohane, M.D., make the argument that EMR and EHR vendors are holding back innovation in the health IT industry. Many vendors, the duo insists, have failed to adopt basic Internet-era sources for their systems such as private cloud-based storage and secure communication protocols, as well as modern consumer technologies such as word processing and search engines…
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The EMR Race is Over, Long Live EMR Extender Tools!

Change Doctor, June 15, 2012 — Lyle Berkowitz
I’ve been increasingly talking about the concept that the EMR race is over, and that EMRs now serve as the infrastructure and platform upon which innovative companies will develop “EMR Extender Tools“, in areas such as: Physician Productivity (e.g. healthfinch), Decision Support (e.g. Zynx), Business Intelligence (e.g. DrEvidence), and Patient Outreach (e.g. Healthloop).  This seems to resonate well with mature EMR users since they often feel like the….
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In the New England Journal of Medicine:
Letting the Air out of EHRs

Mandl and Kohane in the NEJM

Mandl and Kohane in the New England Journal of Medicine: Escaping the EHR Trap — The Future of Health IT [PDF]. It is a widely accepted myth that medicine requires complex, highly specialized information technology (IT) systems. This myth continues to justify soaring IT costs, burdensome physician workloads, and stagnation in innovation — while doctors become increasingly bound to documentation and communication products that are functionally decades behind those they use in their “civilian” life.