The healthcare industry is more focused on the consumer than ever, triggering a call for true interoperability and open health data exchange through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Government regulation, consumer demand and innovative developers will make 2018 the Year of the API.
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), or sets of tools and specifications that enable software to interact, are not a new concept. Other industries have opened up their APIs to enable innovative data exchange. Think about how any car dealer can pull up your financial information, or how your airline ticket can appear on your mobile phone – open APIs make these capabilities possible.
Open APIs are not as common in healthcare, which is part of the reason our industry lags others in being able to offer these consumer-centric information exchange capabilities. Allscripts is the only company that recognized early on how important it was – for innovation and interoperability – to create an ecosystem that makes it easy for applications to take root and deliver what clients need to be successful.
The demand for interoperability in healthcare is bringing APIs into the spotlight, and it’s more important than ever that APIs are open and available to connect disparate technologies to one another.
Interoperability beyond the EHR
For many years, the conversation around healthcare interoperability was narrow in scope: doctor-to-doctor information exchange. But as healthcare organizations successfully adopt electronic health records (EHRs), a variety of interoperability use cases highlight countless opportunities that exist above the EHR.
We hosted National Coordinator for Health IT Don Rucker, M.D., at our company’s annual health conference in August. It was heartening to hear that expanding interoperability is a top priority. Here’s what we heard from Dr. Rucker:
1) There must be a steadfast focus on the consumer. Moving past the focus on patient access, healthcare consumers must have command of their information. Data must be as mobile as they are.
2) Data should be put to work. Clinical data will require analysis by providers and others with a stake in our collective shift to value-based care. Interoperability challenges sometimes limit the industry’s ability to draw insights from ever-increasing amounts of information. Now that we have the data, let’s make it work for us.
3) Open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) will soon be the norm. API toolkits help to make data more mobile, and they do so in a simple, cost-effective way. In fact, APIs will play a big role in achieving the first two priorities described above, if vendors embrace them and providers adopt them. Momentum of APIs is tremendous.
To move forward on these priorities, Dr. Rucker indicated that ONC will be engaging stakeholders while they undertake key definitional work: What does interoperability really mean? What level of data fluidity is necessary to affect both quality and cost? How do we measure information exchange?
As we collectively answer those questions, we will work toward increased access for stakeholders and a framework that improves patients’ access to their own medical records. Every step toward greater clarity and consensus enables us to invest confidently in new interoperability technologies and standards, such as Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), and helps the industry abandon habits that have been keeping information locked away.
Evidence that open APIs are the key to unlocking interoperability
Ten years ago, Apple introduced its first iPhone, introducing a new era of user-centered technology. This technology made it easy for apps and created a brand-new ecosystem. It’s just what healthcare needs.
More than ten years ago, Allscripts was the first in the healthcare industry to embrace an open platform because we recognize this is the only way to achieve the promise of interoperability. Allscripts APIs are open and fully supported, which means that we encourage third-party applications to work with our solutions.
Through our developer network, we’ve helped healthcare applications exchange data nearly 3 billion times in just four years, and that rate continues to climb. In August 2017 Allscripts hit a new milestone by facilitating the exchange of more than 100 million data shares within a single month.
Now, more than 1,000 third-party developers work with Allscripts to deploy innovative solutions using FHIR and proprietary APIs. These relationships are in addition to the 170+ existing Allscripts developer partners, all currently available through the company’s application store (https://store.allscripts.com).
Health IT is always about the patient. By giving innovators access to our APIs, we’re helping clients integrate the innovations that matter most to their patients. The EHR was always a means to the end goal. I am optimistic that ONC’s work on the priorities outlined above, coupled with innovation in the private sector, will be the catalyst needed for true healthcare interoperability.
Chief Executive Officer
Allscripts