Where APIs meet Health Equity by Design: Introducing the FHIRedApp Health Innovation

With a heightened target on health and fitness equity during our work, ONC has adopted the strategy of “health equity by style and design.” Along those strains, wellbeing IT can, and need to, be employed to far better establish and mitigate disparities even though improving possibilities for underrepresented populations. In 2019, less than the Leading Edge Acceleration Assignments (LEAP) for Wellness IT plan, ONC funded the College of Texas at Austin’s Dell Medical College (Dell Med) to style, build, and demonstrate increased affected individual engagement technologies for care and investigate, with a target on health and fitness equity.

The Dell Med crew proposed producing a affected person engagement technological know-how platform making use of software programming interfaces (APIs) and the identical national requirements for interoperability, stability, and authorization becoming employed by electronic overall health information, particularly FHIR® and Smart on FHIR.

Developing the FHIRedApp System

The FHIRedApp platform was built utilizing human-centered layout methodology to establish the desires and tastes of a numerous team of Latino, African-American, and Asian-American patients. To structure an straightforward-to-use platform, the crew held 20 Group Engagement Studio (CES) classes with ethnically and racially varied people from Central Texas. The procedure included beta tests, semi-structured interviews, and pilot screening with individuals to ensure the app’s significant usability.

A community navigator led every single CES session, and the dialogue subjects included community health and fitness ordeals, local community readiness, design choices, adoption, and sustainability. The method for designing the application also included human-centered design methodologies and insights gathered from the CES periods assisted determined capabilities and abilities that ethnically and racially numerous individuals ideal from a overall health app platform.  A large-fidelity prototype of the app (Figure 1) was then produced, beta tested by numerous individuals, and utilised by the enhancement staff to code for the ultimate application.

Image of the FHIRedApp showing the prototype of how the app may work.

Determine 1: FHIRedApp large-fidelity prototype

Though the FHIRedApp will be able to hook up to FHIR API endpoints furnished by qualified EHR systems needed by the ONC Cures Act Remaining Rule, the system has also been designed to leverage health facts exchanges (HIEs) and research networks, which act as facts aggregators from multiple EHRs. The FHIRedApp is also an application platform that allows clients to gain access to their data, grant entry to all or part of their data, and make it available to 3rd-get together app builders through FHIR APIs. The Dell Med staff is presently creating a pilot app to enable with recruitment for exploration research and integration with social providers referral networks.

The development of FHIRedApp has shown how technological know-how improvements utilizing FHIR APIs for exchanging knowledge can be educated via a methodology of neighborhood engagement and human-centered style. Searching ahead, the staff and local community members hope to regularly provide additional characteristics and enhancements on the system and test scalability utilizing other HIEs and knowledge sources in the long run. To understand more about this venture, browse the Dell Med team’s findings.

 

Leave a Reply