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

With a heightened concentrate on health and fitness fairness throughout our perform, ONC has adopted the notion of “health equity by style.” Alongside those people traces, wellness IT can, and must, be applied to far better establish and mitigate disparities when improving prospects for underrepresented populations. In 2019, underneath the Leading Edge Acceleration Assignments (LEAP) for Wellness IT plan, ONC funded the College of Texas at Austin’s Dell Medical University (Dell Med) to design and style, build, and demonstrate improved client engagement systems for care and analysis, with a concentrate on health equity.

The Dell Med staff proposed establishing a individual engagement technologies system using software programming interfaces (APIs) and the very same nationwide requirements for interoperability, safety, and authorization becoming made use of by electronic wellbeing records, particularly FHIR® and Smart on FHIR.

Building the FHIRedApp Platform

The FHIRedApp platform was developed utilizing human-centered style and design methodology to recognize the demands and tastes of a assorted group of Latino, African-American, and Asian-American individuals. To style and design an easy-to-use system, the group held 20 Community Engagement Studio (CES) sessions with ethnically and racially diverse sufferers from Central Texas. The process concerned beta tests, semi-structured interviews, and pilot tests with members to make certain the app’s large usability.

A local community navigator led every CES session, and the discussion subjects involved community wellbeing ordeals, community readiness, design and style tastes, adoption, and sustainability. The approach for developing the app also included human-centered design methodologies and insights collected from the CES classes assisted determined functions and abilities that ethnically and racially assorted people wanted from a wellness application platform.  A large-fidelity prototype of the application (Figure 1) was then designed, beta analyzed by diverse clients, and utilized by the growth staff to code for the remaining application.

Figure 1: FHIRedApp substantial-fidelity prototype

While the FHIRedApp will be capable to join to FHIR API endpoints offered by certified EHR systems demanded by the ONC Cures Act Remaining Rule, the system has also been built to leverage wellbeing information and facts exchanges (HIEs) and research networks, which act as knowledge aggregators from many EHRs. The FHIRedApp is also an application platform that lets people to gain access to their data, grant entry to all or element of their facts, and make it out there to 3rd-celebration application developers through FHIR APIs. The Dell Med workforce is presently establishing a pilot application to assist with recruitment for research experiments and integration with social expert services referral networks.

The improvement of FHIRedApp has shown how know-how improvements applying FHIR APIs for exchanging data can be informed by way of a methodology of group engagement and human-centered style and design. On the lookout ahead, the team and group users hope to frequently give supplemental capabilities and enhancements on the platform and examination scalability utilizing other HIEs and details resources in the future. To study much more about this project, examine the Dell Med team’s results.