SMART on FHIR is changing healthcare – Rimidi joins Cerner Marketplace
Rimidi is on fire because of FHIR. We just launched our Diabetes+Me application in Cerner’s app marketplace, an improtant milestone in interoperability for us as a company. Rimidi is a digital health company providing software and clinical analytics for chronic disease management. Our goal is to make it easier for people with diabetes and their healthcare providers to manage diabetes. That’s a simple goal. Implementing new software that can improve processes and outcomes should be simple, but in healthcare that has not been the case.
Interoperability has stood in the way of innovation. There was no efficient, reproducible and scalable way for third-party applications to interface with electronic medical records. Think of Salesforce and the thousands of apps in their marketplace that you can click to purchase and start using in a fully integrated fashion, painlessly. That hasn’t been possible in healthcare until now. Why is that?
One of the reasons that interoperability has been such a problem is the data specification itself. HL7 is basically not specific enough, meaning that there is too much ambiguity in how it can be implemented at each health system with each EMR installation. This results in a different implementation each time and no consistent framework for companies like Rimidi to build again. Until FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource target: _blank). FHIR is a modern RESTful API for healthcare and it’s going to change everything.
Dr Mark Braunstein, Professor of Health Informatics at the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, said “The tight EHR integration that SMART on FHIR offers apps is increasingly looking like the path forward in areas such as clinical decision support where physicians have long resisted the use of tools that were separate and even apart from their EHR and might even require duplicate data entry.”
SMART builds on the FHIR standard to allow applications to run inside of the EMR workflow in a seamless fashion. This means no signing into a separate system, no toggling between screens, etc. With clinical workflow on the mind of clinicians and administrators across the country, minimizing clicks and optimizing insights is essential. Through the combination of SMART on FHIR, we are starting to achieve an open, competitive market in healthcare that has not previously existed.
So Cerner users, we are on FHIR and ready to go.
