At the HL7 FHIR Applications Roundtable held in New Orleans in December, Health Sciences South Carolina (HSSC) was voted Best in Show for its clinical data repository for South Carolina hospitals.
HSSC worked with a company called Smile CDR to develop a FHIR-based clinical data repository that spans several facilities. In this architecture, each facility has a dedicated repository of clinical data populated in real time based on feeds from various hospital EHR systems. Hospital data is normalized into FHIR Patient, Encounter, Condition, Observation, and other resources. This data infrastructure is then combined with an enterprise master patient index to provide standardized research data reporting, and to enable SMART-on- FHIR based apps with a longitudinal view of data across institutions.
“We are honored that our app won Best in Show among nearly three dozen application developers that have leveraged FHIR to create solutions to today’s health IT challenges,” said James Agnew, head geek at Smile CDR, in a prepared statement. “Having a single data format and a consistent architecture across institutional boundaries and across disciplines will allow Health Sciences South Carolina to integrate data from many sources into clinical research, and to integrate insights from that research into clinical care. This is an elusive goal for many research organizations, but FHIR is helping make it reality in South Carolina.”
Established in 2004, HSSC was the first statewide health data and research collaborative in the United States. Today, HSSC enables multi-institutional health research through its clinical data warehouse and associated governance and research tools. Built on the FHIR standard, the Smile CDR stores clinical, diagnostic and workflow information and more.
The solutions presented in New Orleans ranged from a platform designed around FHIR to enable healthcare organizations to automate clinical care pathways and seamlessly integrate with the system of record, to real-time precision dosing software designed for clinicians to predict the optimal dose of medications that require therapeutic drug monitoring, to helping manage chest pain in the emergency department. Presentations included innovative solutions from Arizona State University, Cedars-Sinai Health System, Regenstrief Institute, GE, InterSystems, Microsoft, Prometheus Research and many more.
