Tag: API

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.

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It’s About Time: Open APIs Finally Burst onto Healthcare’s Sluggish Scene


Nuviun Blog, June 9, 2014 — Sue Montgomery
In the midst of the struggles that we face with interoperability, efforts that support open API use may well hold the keys to the HIT Kingdom…
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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 drumming, dancing, microbiome sharing, and Smart Bell-ing. For more highlights, see Wen Dombrowski’s whole Storify recap.

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”

SMART Reverberations from Health:Refactored

Reflecting on his recent experience at the first-of-its-kind Health:Refactored conference, SMART lead architect Josh Mandel (left) said:

Health:Refactored convened a vibrant mix of doers in Health technology, with a clear focus on designing, building, and iterating on better health tools.  It was an exciting chance to meet and scheme with the broader developer community about SMART, BlueButton+, and the burgeoning marketplace of health APIs. A key theme for me: the critical importance of breaking down silo walls so patients (consumers!) and clinicians can—to echo Zak Kohane’s TEDMED mantra—make their data count for them.

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