The healthcare system seems to become better every day. The growth and development of digital platforms have provided a unique dimension for this particular industry to grow tremendously and provide an excellent service to the seekers. In this context, Apple, the most reputed smart phone and electronics manufacturer in the world, has launched a brilliant personal health record (PHR) platform in beta-version. This new version of PHR is released as part of iOS version 11.3.
This Apple health news is the beginning of a new era where the patients can easily share their personal health information with the entitled service providers. This step can be initiated by hospitals and other healthcare related firms so as to provide the best and safest treatment solutions. An iOS App Development Company will not become sufficient to provide such elegant applications that will maintain the industry standards and meet with the specifications of the contemporary healthcare system.
Apple’s new venture
For the very first time, the world’s largest manufacturer of smart phones, Apple has launched the beta version of a personal health record application. Currently, it has incorporated this application in iOS version 11.3. It has developed this unique platform based on the specifications provided by Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) constructed by HL7, a non-profit standard developing organization. It is considered to be the new face of health records app. This application is being developed and advanced in collaboration with 12 hospitals such as Cedars Sinai, Penn Medicine, Geisinger Health System, and John Hopkins.
Jeff Williams, the COO of Apple, said that the prime motto of this particular application is to aid the consumers spread across the world to lead a better and safer life. The healthcare organizations have provided immense insights and professional aid to make this Apple health records epic better and more efficient. The biggest challenge is to keep these records safe in the cloud system so that any service provider related to this process can access them without any hassle. This PHR can be easily carried on the phone and can be shown to the entitled professionals for better and faster treatment response. The news and rumors of Apple to launch Health Records system have now surfaced and the consumers are hoping for a better day in the future.
Features of Apple health records app
This app will be the first of its kind that will maintain the FHIR standard of specifications fabricated by HL7. This particular smart phone application will carry personal information such as medications, allergies, present condition, ailments, immunization records, etc. In fact, the interoperability feature of this application will also allow the medical professionals to access the information and also to check electronic health records for lab results and other information. The Apple health records app is currently released as a beta version to find out the reaction of the users and its compatibility. All the information enlisted in this app will remain encrypted to keep it safe.
Apple announces Health Records platform and is currently developing a better platform for all the consumers that can be accessed by the entitled professionals as well. As per the plan, this information can be availed by the following professionals or organizations:
By Bill Kotraba, vice president, healthcare solutions and strategy, Information Builders.
Bill Kotraba
Data has long been a popular topic in healthcare and is even more so after this year’s HIMSS. The industry is buzzing about the joint CMS and ONC announcement, which proposes a framework to improve interoperability and support seamless and secure access of health information. The pressure is on for healthcare to tackle their data as the two organizations strive to provide patients with the ability to leverage personal information in various applications. And, this pressure will only increase as we look into the future, making it even more imperative that payers and providers address the issue now.
Beyond interoperability
Look more closely, and you will see that with their recent announcement CMS and the ONC are focusing on healthcare organizations’ ability to manage data across the enterprise. Historically, healthcare has worked from siloed applications and data sources with light integration using interface engines. Recently, healthcare organizations have pinned their hopes on leveraging data effectively through huge investments in new EHR platforms. The reality, pointed out by government officials at HIMSS in Orlando, is that this still results in significant challenges for healthcare organizations to manage information across the data value chain.
Although not part of their proposed framework, CMS and the ONC point out the need for better patient mastering across data sources. Organizations hoped their investment in a centralized EHR platform would solve this but that has proven to not be the case. In addition to patient data, healthcare organizations face challenges in mastering physician data, which can have wide impact, including on value-based care initiatives. The joint proposal also highlights that the ability to push back accurate, cleansed data to source systems is critical.
Healthcare needs a unified approach
Using FHIR to stop data blocking and push the industry towards a standards-based approach will help, but it’s not sufficient for the data challenges facing healthcare organizations. In addition to tackling the issues pointed out at HIMSS, healthcare organizations must:
Health Level Seven International (HL7), announces the launch of the HL7 FHIR Accelerator Program. The program is based on a model piloted by the HL7 Argonaut Project and, more recently, the HL7 Da Vinci Project. The goal is to strengthen the FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) standard and enhance market adoption through a programmatic approach available to myriad stakeholders.
Charles Jaffe, MD, PhD
“HL7 FHIR has achieved remarkable adoption on a global scale,” said Dr. Charles Jaffe, CEO of HL7. “An ever-growing community of implementers has emerged across a broad spectrum of health care, eager to participate in an agile onramp for FHIR adoption and implementation. The HL7 FHIR Accelerator Program provides the framework for that community to leverage the technical capability, management expertise and experience gained during the creation and growth of the Argonaut and Da Vinci Projects.”
Building on the success of current projects – Argonaut (provider-provider and provider-patient) and Da Vinci (payer-provider) – The CARIN Alliance has recently been approved as an HL7 FHIR accelerator project (payer-patient). The three projects are complementary initiatives.
“On behalf of the CARIN Alliance, its board and membership, we are grateful for the opportunity to work more closely with HL7 as part of the FHIR Accelerator Program as we work to develop additional FHIR implementation guides so consumers can get access to more of their health information,” said Ryan Howells, CARIN Alliance Project Manager and Principal at Leavitt Partners. “Consumers and their authorized caregivers are requesting more access to health care data with less friction to empower them to become more informed, shared decision-makers in the care they receive.”
The original concept behind accelerating HL7 FHIR began approximately four years ago with the advent of the Argonaut Project.
Guest post by Gavin Robertson, CTO and senior vice president, WhamTech.
Gavin Robertson
As technology continues to permeate healthcare in different ways, it is becoming increasingly important for providers to have access to the data generated and retained by these technologies. With insurance providers, hospitals and clinics using a variety of electronic health records (EHRs), patient portals and databases, it can be difficult for all providers to have access to all relevant and most recently updated patient information. Differences among EHR vendors and systems make data access, sharing and interoperability nearly impossible.
Interoperability is a hot topic in healthcare today. Healthcare providers want to move beyond conventional Healthcare Information Exchanges (HIEs) that generally exist as single application to single application (P2P) data formats. The HL7 standard data model has helped a lot, but (i) it is too complex and extensive for full adoption, (ii) it is, typically, a specific relational or hierarchical implementation, requiring additional transformation, and (iii) there are a number of implementation variations.
Regardless of the improvements associated with the HL7 standard data model, the challenges facing interoperability remain; in that (a) multiple vendors have multiple ways to represent common data, (b) data may be required from more than one application and associated data sources, (c) poor data quality, (d) there may be no unifying view of data from one or more data sources, e.g., single patient view, and (e) there is no ability to write back to/update data sources.
HL7-based FHIR (Fast Health Interoperability Resources) APIs is a recent attempt to standardize access to data sources, but most vendor systems are nowhere close, as it is a different way of representing data from most vendor data schemas; i.e., object vs relational data representation. Also, some FHIR APIs need access to multiple tables in a single data source or in multiple data sources.
To implement FHIR APIs, one approach is to convert between the data source schemas (relational, hierarchical or flat) and the FHIR object model on-the-fly, but it does not address other shortcomings (poor data quality, no federation and lack of master data management (MDM)/single patient view). Another approach, which improves on just converting formats, is to copy and transform data into FHIR-friendly data stores and enable data services on top. However, this introduces additional problems, including latency, security, privacy, no interactivity; e.g., no write back/update to operational systems, additional storage and systems, and time and cost to implement.
Regardless of the approach, FHIR APIs open up interoperability and raise capabilities to new levels. New workflows can be developed and run using simple power end-user applications, such as BPM, reporting, BI and analytics tools. Examples include new smartphone app-driven BPM workflows running against FHIR API services, include write back/updates, on multiple legacy data sources in multiple organizations. Another example being hybrid cloud installations where multiple data sources are both on premise and in the cloud.
