How an App Store Approach Fuels Innovation and Efficiency in Healthcare

Modern electronic medical record (EMR) platforms come with a set of applications used by clinicians in providing patient care. Many clinicians, however, strongly prefer to use various third-party apps in lieu of their EMR’s preinstalled tools. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, EMR vendors are resistant to provider requests to integrate third-party tools because these platform vendors fear “best of breed” solutions may undermine the value of their products, possibly diminishing future revenue. Provider organizations, for their part, want to give clinicians the tools they prefer, but also want to protect their EMR investment.  

Fortunately, technology in the form of robust, open application programming interfaces (APIs) is available today to help hospitals and health systems integrate “best of breed” apps from a healthcare app store into their existing EMRs. Open APIs have been common in other industries for years. In banking, for example, open APIs can connect a customer’s bank account to mortgage lenders or allow automatic payments of bills, while retail open APIs can enable SMS communication and shipment tracking. The use of open APIs in healthcare has been long overdue; now it’s a reality.

Simplifying integration

Existing integration solutions like HL7 and FHIR do not always meet the bi-directional integration needs of clinicians demanding real-time access to patient care information. The app store approach in healthcare enables seamless integration of best-of-breed solutions with existing EMR systems, fostering innovation by accelerating the adoption of technologies like AI, telehealth, and remote monitoring. This model allows health systems to move beyond single-vendor limitations by choosing tailored tools that address specific needs. Simplifying integration reduces IT workloads and implementation costs, improving operational efficiency. These advancements empower health systems to enhance patient care through personalized, patient-centered solutions that lead to better outcomes.

When done correctly, a standardized integration approach offered through an app store enables third-party applications to seamlessly integrate their workflow experience with an EMR with minimal effort. Gone are the days of traditional interface development and testing that requires two development teams: one development team from the third-party vendor and the other from the healthcare organization. 

While traditional methods like HL7 certainly have a place and that technical approach has offered a way to do bi-directional integration, there is a much more elegant and modern way to integrate with RESTful API coupled with a robust Event Driven Architecture (EDA). REST and EDA solve both polling and pushing of data depending on the third-party use case.

Model of efficiency

An effective app store allows healthcare organizations to evaluate workflow solutions from various vendors and select the product that best meets its workflow needs. The app store should make it easy for a healthcare organization to select the vendor and point that vendor to a standard API or EDA library to complete bi-directional integration. 

The app store also should equip the healthcare organization with the ability to easily turn on or turn off third-party integration and announce what data the vendor does or does not have access to according to the use case. The app store will also allow healthcare organizations to easily swap vendors in cases where incumbent vendors are no longer the best solution.   

The app store gives health systems more control over their workflows because they no longer depend on one vendor to supply all workflow solutions. The entire healthcare industry moved away from best-of-breed to one vendor because integration was so painful and awful that healthcare organizations decided to sacrifice feature functionality for default interoperability. The app store solves the integration challenges so healthcare organizations can go back to selecting the best solution for their clinical users. Best-of-breed always was the correct model and will return under an app store concept. 

For healthcare organizations, the app store model streamlines the integration touch points with the core EMR system by eliminating the need of a bunch of custom interfaces that need constant maintenance and support. While REST and EDA still need to be supported, they function much more standard than negotiated interfaces. 

The industry joke is “if you’ve seen one HL7 interface, you’ve seen one HL7 interface.” This means that no two HL7 interfaces are identical, which defeats the entire purpose of reusability and kills the ability to scale quickly. Which brings us to the main benefit for software developers: They can shrink their code base significantly if they no longer need to support custom interfaces that look slightly different at every implementation. 

Accelerating adoption and innovation

We’re entering a new world where AI and machine learning are going to have a major impact on how care is delivered. But AI and ML are only as powerful as the data to which they have access, so avoiding costly, custom interfaces to feed these systems and replacing them with elegant, modern API-enabled technologies will enable healthcare organizations to quickly determine which solutions are best for them and when to roll out these new solutions. Telehealth, remote patient monitoring, digital front-door, and similar technologies all benefit from the kind of data access an app store affords. 

The impact of healthcare app stores and integrated “best of breed” apps in terms of patient outcomes, personalization, and accessibility can’t be understated. When clinicians no longer have to hunt around in patient records to find information that otherwise should be at their fingertips – or in the case of AI, asking the EMR (machine) a question about a patient and quickly getting the answer – it will significantly help to reduce errors, duplicative tests, and streamline communication between team care members. 

We’re extremely lucky to have such great human beings that do a good job of catching inconsistencies in the records they access today, but there is a much better world that exists in the future that will get clinicians back to what they went to school for originally which is to help people instead of them being robust EMR documentation and coding specialists.

Healthcare organizations that are empowered to deploy fully integrated solutions, including digital front-door solutions, will have a profound impact on how patients engage with healthcare organizations. We see early phases of this with patient portals that most healthcare organizations use, and those patient-facing solutions will only get better over time and with broader access to patient records through superior vendor solutions.

Enabling seamless integration

The healthcare app store’s core tenet is based on the notion of standardized interfaces (REST, EDA, etc.) that behave the same regardless of the underlying EMR system, making global interoperability more likely. When implemented consistently (which is the most important factor), these standards help tremendously with regulatory demands and value-based care initiatives since there is much less variation across deployments.   

By enabling seamless integration of best-of-breed solutions with existing EHR systems, the app store approach not only reduces IT workloads and implementation costs – thus improving operational efficiency – it empowers health systems to enhance care through personalized, patient-centered solutions that produce better outcomes.

Photo: Martin Prescott, Getty Images

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