Krames is a health empowerment company that enables populations to improve health outcomes—whether they’re patients, employees, or simply people who want to live healthier, happier lives.
FHIR is spreading.
I witnessed it firsthand when I joined about 400 other health care IT professionals at the recent HL7 FHIR DevDays conference in Boston. The event was sold out, with a wait list.
That’s a long way from five years ago, when the event featured about 20 developers. Today, FHIR—Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources—is a standard that’s taken hold in the health care industry. That’s because FHIR, together with SMART (Substitutable Medical Applications, Reusable Technologies), improves data interoperability. It creates a framework to build health care applications that don’t rely on one specific vendor.
SMART on FHIR® technologies, a groundbreaking technology, fuels StayWell’s Krames On FHIR®, which integrates seamlessly into the clinician workflow to deliver award-winning Krames On-Demand® personalized patient education at the point of care—making life easier for not only clinicians but for patients, c-suite, and IT, as well. Connected health is finally happening.
3 trends that are helping FHIR take hold
- Apple and Google are building on FHIR credibility
As FHIR is now part of both Apple and Google’s strategy, industry credibility is at an all-time high. The Electronic Health Record (EHR) industry and application developer community have widely adopted FHIR as its standard.
Apple is adopting it as its exchange standard and leveraging it in its API integration. It’s creating an ecosystem of apps to help consumers better manage their health information.
In integrating FHIR with its HealthKit, Apple has created a robust set of health and fitness tools and preset integrations with over 500 health care organizations to bring in health data. Apple’s strategic priority is to expand on health applications within iPhone with FHIR central to its technology strategy.
Google is using FHIR to turn often-overwhelming, “messy” data into understandable and actionable data. We heard the story of a 37-year-old cancer patient who, over the course of her treatment, received enough printouts to fill multiple binders weighing 14 pounds total! Patients say, “It’s great that you gave me all of this information. Now what do I do with it?” App developers are encouraged to summarize and distill data down to a few-line summary, in meaningful and plain language.
- EHRs are firmly committed to FHIR
Many EHRs are marketing themselves as platforms, communicating their intent to integrate application vendors and give customers flexibility for solutions. Compare this approach to only a couple of years ago, when EHR vendors insisted on owning the entire user experience. All of the leading EHRs have embraced the app community with numerous applications, instead of just one or two vendors.
- FHIR is focused on personal device data integration into EHR
Think about stepping on a scale and seeing your data saved to a file. Devices are becoming more personalized to your needs, such as implanted insulin pumps. There’s a huge push for enhancing the tracking of personalized device integration with data for connected devices in the EHR so that clinicians and care teams can access. The FHIR standard is evolving to meet this personalization and we expect more sophistication as to how devices are tracked and what information can be used—differentiating between an emergency room device and an activity tracker, for instance. This personalized and advanced device technology is expanding quickly and offers exciting patient applications.
Analyzing the latest FHIR trends fuels Krames On FHIR
At Staywell, we’re committed to accelerating innovation and continuing to lead the patient engagement industry.
Many applications use FHIR to plug in an application and launch it, but still have it stand alone outside the workflow. Our focus on Krames On FHIR is to have it integrated fully within the clinician workflow to be able to write data back into the EHR. We have a more advanced integration that creates a more robust user experience—one that features personalized patient education, videos, and real-time data. It means a more accurate picture of the patient’s health, as well as data that the patient or clinician can act on. And that leads to better engagement and care, for better outcomes.
Let Krames On FHIR bring the heat to your EHR
Let Krames On FHIR help you tap into innovative technology to enhance your clinician and patient experience by recommending smarter patient education that’s always up to date and in line with best practice standards. Find out more at https://info.staywell.com/kramesonfhir
