11 Nov Interoperability: Now Geisinger has an app for that
Geisinger Health System and xG Health Solutions, a company founded by Geisinger, have connected a software app to an electronic health record by employing a new draft standard developed by international standards organization Health Level Seven.
Geisinger developed a rheumatology app to interact with its Epic EHR. Now, by using the new HL7 draft standards, Geisinger and xG Health Solutions have successfully exchanged clinical data in real-time within the Cerner EHR framework.
Geisinger and xG Health Solutions anticipate enabling apps to work in a similar fashion with all EHRs.
This new “app approach” to augmenting EHR functionality has the potential to transform the delivery of healthcare by giving providers access to analyses of information that resides outside and/or inside the EHR, as well as decision support, regardless of the underlying EHR platform, Geisinger officials say in announcing the feat.
Geisinger expects to make apps like these available to other healthcare systems through xG Health Solutions, founded by Geisinger in 2013 to commercialize Geisinger innovations.
Geisinger and xG Health Solutions used an approach developed with grant support from the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the National Coordinator’s Strategic Healthcare IT Advanced Research Projects, known as SHARP, specifically the open-source Substitutable Medical Apps, Reusable Technologies, or SMART Platform.
This Web-based interoperable container and the corresponding HL-7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources, or FHIR, interface can exchange information in real-time with any SMART-on-FHIR-enabled EHR.