The place APIs meet Well being Fairness via Design: Introducing the FHIRedApp Well being Innovation

David Beckam

With a heightened center of attention on well being fairness all over our paintings, ONC has followed the concept that of “well being fairness via design.” Alongside the ones strains, well being IT can, and must, be used to higher establish and mitigate disparities whilst bettering alternatives for underrepresented populations. In 2019, underneath the Main Edge Acceleration Tasks (LEAP) for Well being IT program, ONC funded the College of Texas at Austin’s Dell Scientific Faculty (Dell Med) to design, broaden, and show enhanced affected person engagement applied sciences for care and analysis, with a focal point on well being fairness.

The Dell Med staff proposed growing a affected person engagement generation platform the usage of utility programming interfaces (APIs) and the similar nationwide requirements for interoperability, safety, and authorization being utilized by digital well being information, particularly FHIR® and SMART on FHIR.

Designing the FHIRedApp Platform

The FHIRedApp platform was once designed the usage of human-centered design method to spot the desires and personal tastes of a various workforce of Latino, African-American, and Asian-American sufferers. To design an easy-to-use platform, the staff held 20 Group Engagement Studio (CES) periods with ethnically and racially various sufferers from Central Texas. The method concerned beta trying out, semi-structured interviews, and pilot trying out with contributors to verify the app’s excessive usability.

A neighborhood navigator led each and every CES consultation, and the dialogue subjects integrated neighborhood well being studies, neighborhood readiness, design personal tastes, adoption, and sustainability. The method for designing the app additionally integrated human-centered design methodologies and insights collected from the CES periods helped recognized options and features that ethnically and racially various sufferers desired from a well being app platform.  A high-fidelity prototype of the app (Determine 1) was once then advanced, beta examined via various sufferers, and utilized by the improvement staff to code for the overall app.

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

Determine 1: FHIRedApp high-fidelity prototype

Whilst the FHIRedApp will be capable to connect with FHIR API endpoints equipped via qualified EHR applied sciences required via the ONC Treatments Act Ultimate Rule, the platform has additionally been designed to leverage well being knowledge exchanges (HIEs) and analysis networks, which act as knowledge aggregators from a couple of EHRs. The FHIRedApp may be an app platform that permits sufferers to achieve get admission to to their knowledge, grant get admission to to all or a part of their knowledge, and make it to be had to third-party app builders by the use of FHIR APIs. The Dell Med staff is right now growing a pilot app to assist with recruitment for analysis research and integration with social services and products referral networks.

The improvement of FHIRedApp has proven how generation inventions the usage of FHIR APIs for exchanging knowledge may also be knowledgeable thru a strategy of neighborhood engagement and human-centered design. Having a look ahead, the staff and neighborhood individuals hope to repeatedly be offering further options and improvements at the platform and take a look at scalability the usage of different HIEs and knowledge assets someday. To be told extra about this mission, learn the Dell Med staff’s findings.

 

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