Oystehr Enables Simple Connectivity Across Health Records Platforms

Oystehr — Fri, 12 May 2023 18:56:45 +0000

The Affordable Care Act brought about many shifts in the dynamics of healthcare for the United States. Combined with the extraordinary leaps in technology over the last decade, ACA initiatives have launched a new generation of electronic health and medical recordkeeping. Though this technology continues to evolve in bigger and better ways, the variety and scope of such software remains immense. The ACA, along with CMS, has also introduced new challenges for healthcare systems, Accountable Care Organizations, Managed Services, and providers. Given the incentives available for quality and efficient population management, it has become almost imperative to capture the entire spectrum of patient care. This type of capture allows for not only greater cohesion and synergy between different providers on the patient’s care team, but also for enhanced reporting and a greater understanding of conditions, procedures, medications, and screenings for every patient in a practice.

One of the greatest challenges, however, remains the interoperability and exchange of information between different EHR platforms and reporting avenues. Continued government initiatives have made this exchange much more feasible, however the right technology is critical to leveraging data management to its fullest potential. The United States Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI) sets a standard for data elements that can conform cross-platform. This standardization, combined with the Fast Health Interoperability Resources (FHIR) specification allows uniformity and a level of predictability in data extraction between EHRs, applications, and analytic data stores. When used in conjunction with a fully customizable headless EHR platform, these tools can be enormously powerful and save many hours of data cleansing or normalizing post-intake.

Oystehr is a revolutionary, developer-centric headless EHR platform that allows for full customization of electronic healthcare applications. Providing not only API and data modeling, Oystehr offers compliance and cloud infrastructure capabilities in a single source solution for nearly any use case in the healthcare applications market. Let’s take a look at how this technology could help to create a linkage between a custom, nascent healthcare application and one of the nation’s most popular EHRs.

So you want to connect to Epic…
Epic makes up approximately 34% of the market share in EHRs. There are plenty of well-known use cases for data extraction from Epic, but new ideas are brought to fruition on a constant basis as the platform’s capabilities and reach grow. Leveraging USCDI, FHIR, APIs, and a proven headless solution like Oystehr makes integration seamless. Let’s assume a situation where an obstetrical practice group wishes to create a full-circle medical management application for their patients. Given the complex needs of the patient population, their referral network is expansive and diverse - ranging from cardiologists and endocrinologists to nurse midwives and physical therapists. The practice is not using Epic, but some of their largest referral partners - including the hospital system where most births occur - are. This is an excellent use case for Oystehr, given the need is provider-facing and would not necessarily require a data push into Epic systems, only a pull and consolidation for their continuous care application.

A few simple steps…
The process to connect the practice group’s application to Epic is simple and straightforward, thanks to interoperability and a headless development environment.

Confirm your data ‘host’ is using Epic (in this example). Coordinate with the practice/hospital’s management as needed.
Create your user account on USCDI.EPIC.COM, this will register you as a data extraction entity.
Allow Oystehr’s powerful API tools to create a connection to the Epic EHR API interface.
Leverage Oystehr’s cloud infrastructure capabilities to align FHIR versions and fields between the extract site and your data models.
Configure and customize your Oystehr cloud-based databases.
Experience seamless integration between an Epic-based practice or hospital and your application.
If desired, you can also register as an application developer with Epic’s App Orchard. This will allow not only autonomous interaction with the Epic API, but additional data extraction from Epic Hyperspace!

What can I extract?
Epic allows for a full spectrum of health record extraction, including:

Vital signs
Lab results
Diagnostic studies (e.g. MRI)
Clinical notes (by an provider)
Prescribed medications
Implantable devices
Allergy and intolerance information
Problem list for patient
Procedures (e.g. surgery)
Patient demographics and care team
Immunization records

Resources:

HealthIT.Gov. “United States Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI)”. 2023.

https://www.healthit.gov/isa/united-states-core-data-interoperability-uscdi

Tuan, Joe. “How to Integrate a Health App with Epic EHR/EMR”. December 7, 2022.

Topflight. https://topflightapps.com/ideas/how-integrate-health-app-with-epic-ehr-emr/

Oystehr. “The Complete Health Tech Developer Platform”. 2023.

https://oystehr.com

Want to read the full blog?

https://oystehr.com/post/connectivity-across-health-records-platforms

What is a Headless EHR?

Oystehr — Fri, 12 May 2023 18:50:12 +0000

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are used to store medical information. If you’ve ever been a patient at a hospital or clinic, it’s likely your data is stored in an EHR.

A headless EHR is an EHR without a user interface — all data is accessed programmatically. It provides APIs (Application Programming Interface) for retrieving and updating medical data. User-facing applications are built using the APIs.

Headless EHRs provide flexibility when building simple or complex healthcare applications — with a traditional EHR it can be challenging to interact with medical information and other systems, but headless EHRs are designed to be interacted with programmatically. You can choose how and when your backend interacts with frontend systems, such as a website or patient app, using an API.

We’re building a headless EHR called Oystehr.

Pros

Building from scratch is a riskier path, but the largest pro of building with a headless platform is that it lets organizations customize EHRs. Traditional EHRs may ‘customize’ out-of-the-box offerings for individual organizations, but this short-term solution can only do so much contrasted with custom software built with unique use cases in mind from the get-go. Traditional EHRs often come with a large number of features that make their system bulkier and harder to use — and even then the EHR may be missing features organizations want.

With a headless EHR, you have control to design and build the entire system. This means you can choose which features to build – and what to exclude or delay as your organization grows. We believe headless EHRs will continue to grow — and if they do, it’s likely applications will be built on top of them that you will be able to use.

Another advantage of headless EHRs is cost: while the upfront cost to build may be higher, the long-term costs are likely significantly lower than with a traditional EHR. When you sign up for a traditional EHR, you risk being siloed into an EHR you’re unhappy with until the end of the contract period. Transitioning to another traditional EHR carries the same risks, plus the added costs of converting and exporting patient data between potentially non-interoperable formats. Oystehr charges usage-based pricing. If you decide you aren’t happy, you can switch to another EHR because you haven’t signed any contracts, and the records are stored as industry-standard FHIR for easy exportation.

Cons

While we think that building on top of a headless EHR will give you a better application in the long run of your organization's growth, some companies may not want to take on the risk of going with a headless EHR. Unlike a traditional EHR, which comes with a pre-built user interface, an organization that chooses to go headless may need to build and customize an EHR, or to work with an already-built frontend.

The planning involved in creating a complete and flexible headless EHR system means that the time to get up and running is longer. Traditional EHRs give you a fast speed to market with something that “works just enough”.

All in all, the up-front costs to getting started with a headless EHR will likely be higher than with a traditional EHR. We know that headless EHRs aren’t for everybody. But if you’ve tried building on top of traditional EHRs — and gotten frustrated just as we did — a headless EHR may be worth considering.

Want to read the full post? You can do so here on our blog: https://oystehr.com/post/what-is-a-headless-ehr

DEV Community: Oystehr

Oystehr Enables Simple Connectivity Across Health Records Platforms

What is a Headless EHR?