A number of EHR developers and leading provider organizations are collaborating on a new alliance formed to promote web-based interoperability and health information exchange, according to an article in Modern Healthcare. The Argonaut Project, as it is known, aims to further development and adoption of the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), a framework for health IT standards released by Health Level Seven (HL7) earlier this year.
HL7 has launched the project in partnership with EHR developers athenahealth, Cerner Corp, Epic Systems, Meditech, and McKesson, along with Beth Israel Deaconess and Partners HealthCare in Boston, Intermountain Healthcare in Salt Lake City, and the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. The Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative, a health information exchange organization, will manage the project. Also joining are The Advisory Board Co, a Washington-based consulting firm, and SMART (Substitutable Medical Apps, Reusable Technology), a mobile application development project at the Boston Children’s Hospital Informatics Program.
Instead of the current system for health information exchange, which relies on transmitting static electronic documents from one location to another, the alliance advocates the development of application programming interfaces (APIs) to enable EHRs to exchange data with mobile apps and write data back to each other. The system would mimic the approach of major platforms such as those by Apple and Android, where capabilities emerge both from the platform developers themselves, as well as third-party developers.
“It brings Facebook-, Google- and Amazon-like thinking to healthcare IT,” said John Halamka, MD, chief information officer at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
The first API-based products are expected to emerge in 2016.
