Put FHIR to Work Faster to Advance Your Healthcare System Interoperability
How can we spark FHIR accelerator?
We posted recently about what the FHIR standard is and its tremendous potential for healthcare interoperability.
Now let’s look at 6 benefits for healthcare software companies and providers to accelerate their FHIR capabilities so EHRs and healthcare information systems share data more meaningfully today.
6 Benefits of Accelerating FHIR in Your Healthcare Organization
The benefits of FHIR-based data exchange are clear.
A FHIR accelerator can help technology vendors and providers to realize those benefits as quickly as possible to:
Build Healthcare Data Interfaces Faster and Easier
Let’s say you’re building a house. You could forge your own tools, chop down trees for wood, and craft bricks yourself. But of course you would instead start with the right existing, useful, and effective tools and materials to build your house better, easier, and faster.
That’s kind of the idea of a FHIR accelerator: Start your interface program with the FHIR foundation and tools you need to get the job done right and fast.
Even without an accelerator, FHIR makes API development faster and easier. The FHIR standard embraces more modern API technology than previous HL7 versions, including the RESTful protocol and a choice of JSON, XML, or RDF for representing data. Developers have more experience with these advanced tools, making the standards easier to learn and rapidly getting APIs to market.
Now imagine plugging in an acceleration “engine” that immediately delivers 80 percent or more of the FHIR infrastructure you need for every API you develop. Your developers can start FHIR API projects with the finish line in clear sight.
Save Money with FHIR Accelerator
Efficiency saves money. If your organization can cut out 80 percent of the effort to build FHIR APIs, you can focus developers on other priority projects and not allocate high labor costs to FHIR API development. A rock-solid FHIR acceleration platform minimizes expensive fixes and rework, with more consistent and reliable maintenance and support to cut costs for product and customer success teams.
Build Better FHIR APIs
Standard tools, protocols, testing, and development discipline make FHIR APIs more effective, reliable, and consistent. EHRs and other health information systems can talk to each other in the most common language yet.
There are many other ways FHIR APIs make healthcare data exchange work better, including:
- Unstructured Data Exchange: Unlike previous HL7 standards, FHIR lets systems share unstructured data—things such as scanned images, handwritten doctor notes, and PDF files—that comprise 80 percent of all healthcare data.
- “Resources” That Create Better, More Intuitive Data Exchange: FHIR introduced the concept of “resources” to healthcare APIs. Resources represent common healthcare categories such as patients, lab results, insurance claims, and appointments. Resources make FHIR APIs interpret and exchange more health data, more flexibly and intuitively.
Up Their App Game with SMART on FHIR
The faster you get to FHIR, the faster you can take advantage of SMART on FHIR. SMART (Substitutable Medical Applications and Reusable Technologies) launched in 2010 to help build single apps that work with any health information system. This gives patients and providers the easiest health data access using fast, flexible phone or device apps that best fit their needs.
The SMART initiative realized that FHIR could move its goals forward faster and established a collaboration. SMART on FHIR apps let providers, payers, and patients view patient records, monitor heart health, schedule tests and labs, and much more. They can pull in data from almost any EHR system, whether it’s Epic, Cerner, Allscripts, athenahealth, or others.
SMART on FHIR revolutionizes how apps can obtain data, allowing them to see and use data from a healthcare information system without having to move the data from one system to another.
Accelerate Returns from M&A and Other Vendor Partners
Anyone in the software business knows the growing pains when companies acquire, merge, or partner with another vendor. Rationalizing and integrating new platforms can take years of effort just to begin delivering on the promises of the press release that announced the deal.
Accelerated FHIR capabilities expedite and significantly improve this process. Companies can make systems work together quickly and effectively with FHIR APIs while planning and executing longer-term integration.
Power a Connected Care Experience by Accelerating FHIR
Accelerating FHIR implementation fast tracks your ability to make healthcare systems speak and understand the same language:
- Make healthcare data exchange faster, more efficient, more accurate, and more useful than ever before
- Improve doctors’ clinical point-of-care decisions and care coordination
- Give consumers and patients more access to their health information
- Amplify financial performance by taming the revenue cycle
FHIR makes APIs much more flexible and intuitive while also making it easier for other systems to recognize, organize, and use healthcare data. Accelerating FHIR APIs will advance the Connected Care Experience for patients, doctors, nurses, care coordinators, lab techs, claims processors and billers, discharge planners, and everyone involved in the care journey:
How Can You Boost FHIR Accelerator?
Healthcare has well-founded optimism that FHIR can move us further toward meaningful data sharing than ever before to actually improve care outcomes and reduce costs. Software companies, providers, and payers seek the fastest, most reliable path to connect their systems and share data using the FHIR standard.
Consider the KMS Connect model:
The KMS Connect FHIR accelerator enables 80 percent or even 90 percent of your FHIR interface platform off the shelf. From there, you just need to configure the specific endpoints, export data, and monitor activity through a single management console.
Which leads us to the most important recommendation.
Find a FHIR Accelerator Partner to Deliver Your Best Integration Results Fast
Always eagerly seek the best guide and FHIR partner to help you navigate interoperability
Whether you are a vendor, payer, or provider, the right FHIR and healthcare technology experts will help you:
- Assess your healthcare data integration challenges and opportunities
- Define the right FHIR API development roadmap and goals
- Establish a confident path to accelerate your FHIR success
- Develop, test, document, and support for your FHIR APIs
Demand this level of knowledgeable guidance and healthcare technology mastery from any partner you consider. A solution like FHIR Connect will accelerate your success with a ready, smart, plug-in platform that does runs three-quarters of the race to build outstanding FHIR interfaces for you and your customers.
KMS Healthcare is here and excitedly ready to help. Rely on KMS Healthcare as your partner to forge the right path to accelerate FHIR interoperability, whether you’re a trusted vendor, provider, payer, or life sciences organization.
Schedule a free consultation today to see how KMS Healthcare can help.