Whether driven by private-sector innovation or government mandates, the move to Open Healthcare was underway before the Covid-19 pandemic, but 2020 has underscored the urgency for interoperability and truly digital healthcare.
FHIR implementation is poised to support rapid adoption of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), which are enabling people, providers, plans, and governments to share more data faster and easier. APIs allow outside apps to connect with electronic health record (EHR) systems, and these can help solve massive healthcare challenges. But it is API-first thinking, not just compliance with HHS interoperability rules, that can truly unlock the potential for solutions that are secure and patient-centered.
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We are in the middle of an unprecedented vaccination campaign rolling out across the world. The creation and mass production of several highly effective Covid-19 vaccines in less than a year is truly extraordinary. But the fight against this virus isn’t over yet Logistical challenges are daunting, and then there are very real security hurdles, as demonstrated by recent cyberattacks on vaccine data.
Healthcare organizations have historically connected with other healthcare organizations – this was point-to-point and purpose-built. But as governments move to build citizen-centric applications and healthcare opens up their data to patients, healthcare organizations need to look at APIs as an engagement method, thinking about APIs as a product all while keeping API security, management, and monitoring as first-order priorities.
Right now, people need real-time tools. A hospital that needs to vaccinate thousands of patients needs to also coordinate Covid-19 tests – because they don’t want to vaccinate someone who is currently sick – and their teams are already stretched thin.
An API-first approach supports low-code solutions, and that is of immense value to healthcare facilities right now. These solutions are lightweight and can be delivered to a device carried by a clinician throughout the hospital, enabling them to process more life-saving immunizations, faster.
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But using APIs doesn’t just enable faster delivery of services; it also means better performance and a better patient experience. Providing a set of standardized interfaces that meet the needs of consumers reduces test time, production breakage, and upgrade complexity, and it also puts the patient at the center of the experience.
This isn’t an unlikely scenario: you go to receive a Covid-19 test in a hospital parking lot, wait for a negative result; three days later show up at that same hospital for a Covid-19 immunization and are handed a stack of paperwork to fill out and asked to provide proof of a negative test.
The patient sits in line, frustrated with more paperwork – even though they were at the hospital mere days ago – and the hospital staff, already spread thin, has more information to digitize. If the hospital opens up its data via APIs, the IT team can quickly build a low-code solution that instantly pulls from the existing Covid-19 tests administered in the hospital’s parking lot to verify that a person can receive their immunization.
We are often sitting on a wealth of information, but we tend to make it too hard for the teams in the hospital to share. Security is the main motivator here, and understandably so as US and UK cybercrime authorities recently warned of an increased threat to hospitals and healthcare providers. Moving large amounts of data around so freely in real time generates a lot of traffic, but it can be done securely with robust monitoring.
An open healthcare platform requires an API management system, a gateway that sits in front of your FHIR server and enforces the policy from your Chief Security Officer. A truly sophisticated API management engine monitors all the traffic to make sure that everyone gets appropriate service and watches out for denial-of-service attacks. APIs must be protected by the latest security protocols and standards such as OAuth for authentication and OpenID to validate credentials as required by the Interoperability Rule.
One bright side that everyone tends to forget is user experience in healthcare. There’s so much potential for improvement with APIs and developer portals that help citizens get access to their data more effectively.
By wrapping FHIR APIs, which are a relatively raw patient data set, into a more consumable API such as experience APIs, we can start to enable nimble, low-code work inside organizations. Now we equip ourselves to live in a real-time world and do totally unplanned things, like stand up a vaccination system in days or weeks instead of an 18-month project schedule.
Just as importantly, many people are feeling stress, uncertainty, and are overwhelmed right now. We can and we must create a smoother, more positive experience for patients, putting people at the center of their care.
Picture: DrAfter123, Getty Images
Ruby Raley is VP of Healthcare and Life Sciences at Axway. The company empowers customers to compete and thrive in dynamic marketplaces using hybrid integration solutions to better connect their people, systems, businesses and digital ecosystems. More than 11,000 organizations in 100 countries rely on Axway to solve their data integration challenges.
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